Abstract:

Universities are complex ecosystems of service provisions, where different actors (teaching and administrative staff) interact to create value for all actors (not only students, but also faculty members, and the society at a larger scope). The Service Dominant Logic (SDL) from Marketing literature and particularly the concept of value co-creation (Vargo et al. 2017) is a valuable lens to analyze these Universities ecosystems. Here, the interest is into the librarians-researchers interaction as value-creating actors.

Existing research has addressed how (public) libraries can engage themselves in co-creation processes, but mostly to determine the level of user satisfaction with the library services as citizens (e.g. Moring, & Ruthven, 2022), or students (e.g. Zajdel & Michalcewicz-Kaniowska, 2018). But no interest, to the best of our knowledge has been devoted to evaluate the outcome of a mutual process of co-creation between professors as researchers and technical staff as librarians.

The paper purpose is therefore to provide an overview of how this collaboration among librarians and researchers takes place through the lens of the Value Co-Creation concept. Three librarian staff from The Library of Social Sciences at the University of Valencia (Spain) were asked to help a team of three researchers from two Spanish Universities to undertake a bibliometric study on the concept of Consumer Value (CV) applied to Arts Management (AM). The literature on value stands that it is one of the more elusive and polysemic notions, and the field of Arts spreads into very different and varied industries (e.g. music, paintings, cinema, festivals, etc.) making therefore of a bibliometric review a double challenge in terms of what and where to search in academic sources.

This exercise shows how co-creation (through the concept of co-production (Ranjan & Read, 2016) and the dimensions of knowledge sharing, equity, and interaction) may illustrate the roles and relations between the library professionals and the researchers and professors. The results of a pilot study with an open-ended questionnaire answered by all six actors show different value creation perceptions from each side, but favorable knowledge sharing and equitable interaction.

References:
[1] Moring, C., & Ruthven, T. S. (2022). ‘Organizing professionalism’ - a discussion of library professionals’ roles and competences in co-creation processes. Information Research, 27(Special Issue) doi:10.47989/colis2213
[2] Ranjan, K. R., & Read, S. (2016). Value co-creation: concept and measurement. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 44, 290-315.
[3] Vargo, S.L., Akaka, M.A., & Vaughan, C.M. (2017). Conceptualizing value: a service-ecosystem view. Journal of Creating Value, 3(2), 117-124.
[4] Zajdel, M., & Michalcewicz-Kaniowska, M. (2018). Evaluation of the main library of the university of science and technology within the scope of evaluation of the effectiveness of the use of available electronic and printed resources. In ICERI2018 Proceedings (pp. 8444-8448). IATED.

Keywords:

Consumer Value, Bibliometrics, Collaboration Librarians-Researchers, Faction, Emotional and Social Values.