The research assets of a university become its country's competence. To enhance research within higher education institutions, the importance and professionality regarding the research support service of their libraries have been emphasized, and the government requires it to be prepared. However, while the research environment rapidly changes due to innovative technology development, the research support service of current domestic university libraries does not have documented systems or guidelines, but performs sporadically, so it needs service transformation for the new environment.
Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop the research support service model of a university library, which prepares for the changing research environment and supports the entire research process. In particular, components of the research support service at each stage of research are developed based on the 'research lifecycle' to support the entire research process, and a service operation system model is proposed for effective service management. To fulfill the purpose of this study, literature review, survey, and interview are used as the research method as the following process.
First, a literature review is conducted to understand the concept, contents, and current status of the research support service, and to find out changing research environment. In particular, research stages and service components to be conducted at each stage are collected through the literature search. The collected research stages and service components are arranged from all the components, deleted for duplicates items, and integrated for repeating or similar components, which results in a service model draft with 54 components and 6 stages in total.
Second, the service model draft was examined for the adequacy of each component through the preliminary research by the preliminary research team of one professor, one doctoral student, and two librarians. The preliminary research examined if each component is arranged according to the research stage, and if the contents of each service component are appropriate for a survey question, and refined, integrated, and rearranged each component, resulting in a service model with six-gun stages and 48 components.
Third, to find out the need of each service component and to draw additional components, a survey of service users was conducted for the service model examined by the preliminary research team. The survey of four-year college professors and graduate students shows that the suggested 48 components satisfied criteria after analysis of mean and median value, and then, none of the components was to be removed. The result of variance analysis to analyze the need for positions and majors tells that one component from a professor position and three components from a doctoral student position are needed more than ones from other positions. By major, one component from humanities and social science and one component from science and engineering are highly needed, but any other components are not needed more from business and other fields in statistics. In addition, open-ended questions for deriving extra services drew two service components, and one component changed its name, and then, the research support service model with six stages and 50 components was developed.
Fourth, the survey of the librarians who provide the service was conducted to find the core of effective performance of the developed research support service model on the spot. As a result of the survey of librarians in four-year colleges/universities in the country, a total of 20 core elements were discovered, and the core elements were found in every stage of the research.
Fifth, to listen to field applicability validation and considerations about the management of the developed research support service model, interviews with experts in the field were conducted. The experts are two library directors who are also professors in the department of library and information science and four librarians who have worked in the university library for more than 20 years and have five or more years of experience in research support service. The result of the interviews shows that the role of university libraries needs to change into research data management and open access, and so on, and cooperation among related departments in the university, increment of librarians, and specialized training programs should be considered for effective research support service.
This research support service model developed through the processes above are proposed as 'the research support service component model' that consists of six stages and 50 components including 20 core elements and as 'the research support service operation system model' that is composed of the organic system among government and related organizations, university libraries and organizations inside universities.
The research support service component model and operation system model proposed by this study have significance in its development for listening to the needs and opinions of both service users and service providers, composing it along with the research life cycle to support the entire research process, and being an available reference for job analysis of university library with the systematized range and contents of research support service. The result of this study is to be used in the future as basic data for university libraries ' research support service systematization and advancement to enhance the university's research performance and for the reasonable functional management and restructuring of university libraries.