An introduction to the University of Otago Library Capability Framework and what its data reveals about the capabilities required by researcher-facing librarians delivering inside-out services.

Lorcan Dempsey has coined the term “inside-out” to describe how academic libraries are increasingly supporting the processes of research at their institutions (Dempsey, 2016). Digital scholarship, changes in scholarly communication practices, advancing technology, and the growing use of bibliometrics for research evaluation, are fuelling the evolution of library research support services. Researcher-facing librarians are increasingly being required to upskill and engage with the research process at deeper, more technical, levels. In 2019 a project commenced at the University of Otago Library to gather information about the knowledge, skills, abilities and attributes of researcher-facing librarians performing inside-out tasks. Various job descriptions were collected and analysed, a survey was sent to IATUL members mapping inside-out tasks to capabilities, and a workshop was held at the 2019 IATUL conference where further data was collected. All this work has now resulted in a capability framework designed to support recruitment, professional development, and address the challenges faced by researcher-facing librarians and their managers grappling to introduce and sustain inside-out services. This paper will introduce the capability framework in its current form. It provides commentary on interesting findings in the project data and discusses how they influenced the building of the capability framework.