The relationship between the user and the academic library has been the lifeblood of information and library work since the very beginning of libraries. Yet the interaction between users and library workers had long been tacitly accepted as an unchanging assumption about the nature of users’ information needs. While previously out of the spotlight in favour of processes and services that emphasised efficient, demonstrable and tactile outcomes, the latest focus on social relations represents a sea change in the value proposition of academic libraries and foregrounds a subtle but fundamental shift in the dynamics between user and library. Where services and resources were previously reliable and predictable functions, they are now evolving and growing organisational outcomes that are driven by user behaviour around information, technology and pedagogy. The timeline of these changes is overwhelming: in just over two decades, libraries have gone from card catalogues to the digital shift, and now to the social transformation of the library and its staff into an interconnected and networked organisation. So important has the connection to users become that libraries as organisations unto themselves have had to grapple with a new kind of organisational learning: the library that fails to evolve may find itself relegated to a peripheral status relative to its peers and partners that it would not otherwise have chosen.

What this all means is that libraries find themselves as dependent on their users as the latter previously found themselves dependent on the former for good information. The very nature of the reciprocal agreement that libraries have maintained in some form with their user community is now almost entirely socially conditioned and interrelational. Libraries have kept up in practice by becoming adept managers of their social content in the context of social media and branding and by reimagining the mechanisms that deliver services and resources, including, for example, liaison programs, embedded librarians and a social media presence, among many others. In the wake of each of these innovations, a literature on best practices and implications has kept up to ensure other library workers have access to the latest information to design their own local responses.

Yet, where practice has kept pace, the broader intellectual framework in which libraries endeavour to engage their users has, regrettably, remained under-developed and lacking in strength and cohesion.