6 Ways Libraries Can Strengthen Science Diplomacy
International science doesn’t fail due to a lack of vision, ambition, or talent. It falters on logistics, coordination, and the subtle threads that hold complex teams and transnational partnerships together. That’s the central message from Cole Donovan’s insightful essay, What Happens When the Nuts and Bolts of Science Diplomacy Come Loose? (via the National Academy of Sciences ISSUES)
From stranded equipment such as neutrino detectors, which spent a year sitting in a parking lot due to unresolved legal and bureaucratic issues, to visa delays, missing customs waiver authorities, and gaps in institutional memory, Donovan’s article highlights a hard truth. The United States struggles to serve as a reliable partner in major international research collaborations. The problem isn’t the science itself; it’s the systems that surround and support it. The delays and disruptions often stem from administrative and policy obstacles rather than technical challenges.
So could libraries help?
Research libraries are often positioned as passive infrastructure or limited to back-end support, quietly maintaining collections, licenses, and systems behind the scenes. But we have the potential to be much more than that. By embracing a mindset rooted in connective infrastructure, collaborative memory, and team enablement, libraries can take an active role in shaping the ecosystems that support global research. We can help reduce friction, bridge gaps between disciplines and institutions, and provide the continuity and coordination that large-scale international science so often lacks. In doing so, we become not just supporters of science, but strategic partners in its success.
Here are six ways we can begin:
Be the Institutional Memory for Global Research Projects
International research collaborations often unfold over decades and involve multiple institutions, agencies, and political contexts. As these projects evolve, leadership shifts, roles change, and people move on. In this environment, critical decisions, agreements, and rationales can be easily lost or forgotten. Without a clear and accessible record of what was decided and why, teams risk repeating mistakes, losing momentum, or failing to meet commitments. Large-scale science diplomacy efforts like DUNE highlight how vulnerable institutional knowledge can be when it depends on scattered emails, personal notes, or isolated departmental records.
Library Opportunity: Research libraries and archives can take the lead in developing and maintaining internal knowledge bases, project timelines, and decision logs for collaborative initiatives. By integrating documentation, communications, policies, and data workflows, libraries can help preserve institutional memory across the lifespan of a project. This ensures that essential knowledge is not tied to individuals but remains available and actionable as teams grow, shift, or change over time.
Build PKM Systems for Collaborative Research Teams
Research is not just about generating new knowledge, it's about organizing, connecting, and making sense of it over time. In collaborative environments, especially those involving multiple institutions or international partners, the challenge is not just individual productivity, but shared understanding. Teams often struggle with scattered notes, version confusion, siloed data, and inconsistent documentation practices. While researchers may have personal systems for managing information, those systems are rarely designed with team cohesion or long-term accessibility in mind.
Library Opportunity: Research libraries can play a formative role by helping teams intentionally build both personal and collective knowledge management (PKM/CKM) systems from the outset. Rather than retrofitting order into chaos later, libraries can support scientists in managing notes, drafts, protocols, data snapshots, funding documents, and meeting records in ways that promote structure, clarity, and long-term usefulness. This means going beyond storage to emphasize retrievability, linkability, and navigability, and essentially, turning scattered and ad hoc materials into a coherent system that evolves with the team and supports collaboration across time, roles, and institutions.
Translate Science Diplomacy into Local Research Practice
Science diplomacy often exists at the level of treaties, bilateral agreements, and international policy discussions. But its real-world impact is felt in research labs when shipments of equipment are delayed by customs classifications, when visas are held up, or when collaborative agreements create confusion about data ownership or intellectual property. These challenges can slow down or even halt projects, particularly for international or early-career researchers who may not have the experience or support to navigate these systems.
Although these issues may seem administrative, they are essential to the success of global scientific collaboration. The space between policy and everyday research practice is where many promising projects encounter unnecessary friction, not because of scientific failure, but due to a lack of clarity and coordination.
Library Opportunity: Research libraries in collaboration with the research office and other partners can help close this gap by offering briefings, consultations, or workshops that make international science and technology policy understandable and actionable for local research teams. This might include guidance on data governance, research compliance, cross-border authorship practices, or institutional review processes. By equipping researchers with the tools and understanding they need, libraries (and partners) can help teams operate with greater confidence and agility in the complex landscape of international collaboration.
Support Talent Mobility with Onboarding and Engagement
International researchers bring vital expertise, diverse perspectives, and essential collaborations to research institutions. Yet despite their contributions, they often encounter fragmented, confusing, or inconsistent onboarding processes. Navigating U.S. systems such as visas, IRB procedures, export controls, and collaboration agreements can be overwhelming, especially when these processes vary across departments and lack clear coordination.
This friction not only delays productivity but also affects how welcomed and integrated researchers feel within their new environments. Missed steps in compliance or misunderstandings about research norms can lead to avoidable complications that undermine trust and collaboration. A strong onboarding experience is not just administrative; it is foundational to research culture and long-term success.
Library Opportunity: Research libraries can partner with international centers, human resources, and research offices to co-design smooth, centralized onboarding experiences for international researchers. These efforts can include orientation to research data policies, compliance standards, publishing expectations, open science practices, and institutional tools. By providing clear, accessible guidance at the beginning of a researcher’s journey, libraries can help create a more connected, informed, and collaborative research community.
Preserve Data + Relationships
It’s not just about the data. What gives data its true value is the surrounding context, such as how it was collected, what decisions shaped its structure, who contributed to it, and what questions it was designed to answer. This relational knowledge is often informal and scattered across conversations, meeting notes, or personal memory. As teams evolve or projects expand across institutions and countries, these connections can easily be lost, leaving future collaborators with data that is technically accessible but practically unusable.
Preserving datasets without preserving their underlying logic, intent, and collaborative history leads to significant knowledge loss. The challenge is not just storing files, but ensuring that others can interpret, reuse, and build on what came before.
Library Opportunity: Research libraries can go beyond traditional repositories by promoting the use of relational metadata, contextual annotations, and research narrative archiving. By capturing decision-making processes, documenting experimental versions, and linking contributors to specific stages of a project, libraries can help ensure that data remains meaningful over time. This approach supports continuity, fosters collaboration, and preserves the invisible threads that hold complex research projects together
Invest in the Culture of Global Science
Science diplomacy is not only about treaties, formal agreements, or joint statements. At its core, it is about building trust, cultivating shared purpose, and sustaining long-term relationships across borders. These relationships are rooted not just in policy but in culture, basically in the way institutions acknowledge one another, celebrate collective achievement, and recognize the interdependence of global knowledge systems.
Perhaps… the cultural dimension of science diplomacy is overlooked? Researchers and institutions may collaborate on papers or experiments, but without visibility into the broader story that includes the people, places, and histories that shape these partnerships, the sense of shared enterprise can remain fragile. To support lasting global collaborations, we must also invest in how science is remembered, how it is narrated, and how it is celebrated.
Library Opportunity: Research libraries and archives are uniquely positioned to support the cultural dimension of science diplomacy. They can host international science diplomacy events, facilitate community-building across institutions, and curate digital exhibits or storytelling initiatives that highlight cross-border collaborations. Libraries can also capture oral histories and develop profiles of major international projects, preserving the human and institutional narratives behind the data. By helping tell the story of science as a shared, global pursuit, libraries can strengthen the connective tissue that makes collaboration resilient over time.
Closing Thoughts
Participating in international research requires more than scientific expertise. It depends on systems and relationships that support collaboration across time, cultures, institutions, and regulatory environments. This is where research libraries can offer meaningful and often underutilized contributions.
Libraries already provide many of the tools and services that international research partnerships rely on. These include data stewardship, policy guidance, publishing support, curated collections, repositories, analytical tools, and metrics expertise. While essential, these contributions are often fragmented across units or treated as secondary to the research itself. What would it mean to approach this work not only in service of our individual institutions, but in support of the success of the global research enterprise?
Adopting this broader perspective invites libraries to view themselves as part of a larger, interconnected system. By coordinating efforts across institutions, aligning with international standards, and becoming more embedded in collaborative workflows, libraries can reduce friction, strengthen continuity, and build more durable frameworks for shared inquiry. Supporting global research is not an additional task. It is a natural extension of our purpose.
Meeting this challenge may also require the development of new roles within the library. Positions such as research project liaisons, collaboration coordinators, or international engagement specialists could help research teams navigate the complexities of cross-border work. These roles would not replace traditional library functions but expand them into operational and relational areas that often determine whether collaborations succeed or struggle.
Libraries already contribute to international research in quiet but significant ways. By recognizing and expanding these efforts, we can help our institutions become more effective, responsive, and resilient partners in the global research landscape.
