Support
When research communities do not have the means to implement their own VRE, they can increasingly turn to their institution for support. More and more university libraries view the creation and the operation of VREs as new and important tasks that should be taken on. VREs are important for libraries, because such environment help them to curate the various products and semi-products that result from the scholarly process, and, ultimately, to improve and extend their service towards students and researchers.
Preservation
To some extent, the implementation of VREs can be seen as logical extension of the traditional task of university libraries. Previously, libraries have focused predominantly on the curation of physical and digital collections and on the provision of access to their holdings. In recent years, many academic libraries have set up institutional repositories to be able to archive scientific and scholarly publications. While traditional library tasks concentrate on the preservation of textual publications such as articles and monographs, today’s eResearch projects generally produce a wide range of other, non-textual, resources, such as databases, digital images or sound and video recordings. These additional resources are not always curated systematically, and there is often a risk that these materials eventually get lost. For university libraries, experiments with web-based collaboration platforms are interesting, since they provide an opportunity to explore an entirely new class of services towards researchers. When libraries facilitate platforms for collaborative research, this enables them to extend the level of their support even further, and to claim a more active role in the full scholarly information cycle. Through a VRE, researchers can ensure that all versions of the resources that are relevant remain available during the research project. Furthermore, at the completion of a research project, libraries can also make sure that the documents or research data that need to be preserved are migrated to a trusted digital repository.
Share knowledge and expertise
When librarians create VREs on behalf of research groups within their institution, this has the additional benefit that knowledge and expertise can be accumulated on a central location. When researchers create VREs themselves, there is a risk that they will develop solutions which have already been implemented elsewhere. Institutional VRE programmes enable librarians to develop expertise on how to support researchers. The core business of libraries has always been the organisation of (digital) content. A university or research library has experience with user requirements and user evaluations, provides support in the use of research tools (e-research literacy), manages these environments and teaches others how to use them. Working in close collaboration with ICT staff, librarians could provide a range of useful inputs into the development of virtual research environments.