For many knowledge workers, our roles have moved from fully in-office to fully remote, and now to a patchwork of remote, hybrid, and back-in-office arrangements. That shift means librarians have to rethink how we design services, training, and access.
After a few years of being mostly remote, I’ve found myself wanting to be back in the office more. For me, that’s driven by more responsibility and changing workplace needs. Still, I can’t imagine running my work without Zoom, Google Chat, and the occasional text message. Remote work changed how I think about work and how I do it. The shift to remote was abrupt, but adjusting to it wasn’t actually that hard for me. That may not be true for everyone, but I’d guess most of us adjusted and found real benefits in working remotely.
Access to information in libraries is now heavily weighted toward digital materials. Researchers have been tracking a steady decline in physical collection and service use alongside a corresponding rise in electronic resource use since as early as 2008 (Martell, 2008), and that shift has only accelerated (Kortick, 2021).
Even special collections are being digitized at a growing rate: the Museo del Prado in Madrid, for example, recently launched a digital library comprising 1.7 million web pages and 11,500 publications (Breeding, 2025), and university special collections libraries are running similar large-scale digitization projects to open unique holdings to remote researchers.
Recent scholarship backs this up too, noting that digitalization is reshaping library collections by increasing both accessibility and preservation capacity (Rathod, 2025). Of course, not everything can be made digital. Some material still requires physical access.
Designing Library Services for the Realities of Hybrid Work
All of this means we have to design library services for the way work happens now, what our resources and collections allow us to do, and stay flexible for how it will keep changing. A few points worth considering:
- How do most of the users we work with actually work? Where are they physically located?
- Even if most library users are physically in the building, are they the type to leave their desk and go somewhere else in person? Or would they rather message a question virtually?
- How do people across the organization communicate with each other? Is the library using the same platforms as they are?
- What hours do stakeholders actually need support? Has that shifted along with their work patterns?
- Are your training sessions built for people in a room, or do they also work for someone joining from home?
- If your physical space changes, which services must move online to survive?
- Who on your team is your bridge to remote or hybrid stakeholders, and do they have what they need to do that well?
Capturing Knowledge in a Hybrid Library Environment
It’s also worth thinking about how you’re capturing knowledge about how your library runs, in both physical and digital spaces. What knowledge do you need to make sure gets captured for knowledge management? This isn’t only about documenting where things are on a shelf. It’s about capturing the informal knowledge: whom to ask, how a process actually works, and why certain workarounds exist. That knowledge used to spread naturally when everyone worked in the same room. Now it has to be captured deliberately.
As you consider how to best provide library services and resources, whatever type of library you are in, I encourage you to work through the above questions with your staff.
References
- Breeding, M. (2025, August 26). 2025 library systems report. American Libraries Magazine. https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2025/05/01/2025-library-systems-report/
- Kortick, Y. (2021). Trends in physical and electronic resource usage in U.S. academic libraries. https://exlibrisgroup.com/blog/changing-priorities-trends-in-physical-and-electronic-resource-usage-in-us-academic-libraries/
- Martell, C. (2008). The absent user: Physical use of academic library collections and services continues to decline 1995–2006. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 34(5), 400–407.
- Rathod, G. (2025, March 12). The future of library collections: Trends in digitalization, open access and user access. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5258380
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