Introduction

Research and higher education are increasingly focused on tackling complex societal and environmental problems (Civis: Europe’s Civic University Alliance (2025); Leal Filho, et al., 2023). Multiple overlapping approaches have been developed to cross disciplinary boundaries, work with affected communities, and seek to make a difference by engaging policy makers and practitioners, including transdisciplinarity, convergence research, systems thinking, action research and post-normal science (Bammer et al., 2020). Here we focus on “transdisciplinarity”—partly for convenience, partly because it is the approach favoured at our university, and partly because the approach is growing in popularity globally.

Despite growing research and higher educational interest in transdisciplinarity (Gibbons et al., 1994; Jacob, 2015; Ledford, 2015; National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering & Institute of Medicine (2005), a central part of the academic system—libraries—has been slow to embrace transdisciplinarity because of the unique challenges it poses (including defining the term, as we discuss below). We use our experience of a library–academic partnership in developing a library guide for transdisciplinary problem solving to address these challenges, including why dealing with them is important for transdisciplinarity to flourish, and how library–academic collaboration can provide a way forward. We conclude by reflecting on broader ramifications for transdisciplinarity, libraries and the field of information science, seeking to reinvigorate and extend a call made by Martin (2017) for 1) transdisciplinary academics to more fully recognise the importance of libraries and information science in building transdisciplinary expertise and 2) libraries and the field of information science to pay greater attention to codifying and making accessible transdisciplinary and other approaches to tackling complex problems.

Academic libraries have a responsibility to support and enable the strategic directions of their institutions, particularly in education and research (Cox, 2018). Libraries are conduits for access to, and understanding of, information. They do this by providing collections of resources, entry points to subject-specific resources and reading lists, complemented by user support services. The expertise and engagement of library staff are essential for the articulation of information with context, as well as enabling discoverability and usability (Australian Library and Information Association, 2014).

To achieve this, the organisation of libraries generally matches that of their academic institutions, and, despite the growing interest in transdisciplinarity, those institutions are still typically structured around specific disciplines and faculties (Hider and Coe, 2022). Furthermore, library collections have been built up over time, with discipline-based categories and catalogues as traditional adjuncts to the physical collections. Funding for the collections is often tied into the allocation of budgets based on the size of the student body, departmental and teaching needs, and income attracted by academic faculty.

In addition, most librarians in academic institutions specialise in particular subjects, which allows them to provide in-depth, discipline-based support and resources. They develop relationships and networks within their disciplines as a foundation for collaboration and collection building. They also provide tailored academic supports, such as guidance in norms for citations or in-depth research assistance, which can vary considerably according to discipline requirements (Corrall, 2015; Pinfield, 2001).

These structural issues illustrate both the barriers to libraries in encompassing transdisciplinarity and the types of benefits that would accrue if they did so.

To complicate matters further, the systemic, structural, discipline-based barriers in libraries are compounded by the fact that there are multiple research approaches to tackling complex societal and environmental problems, as highlighted earlier. Furthermore, each individual approach provides additional challenges, as our focus on transdisciplinarity illustrates. In particular, there is no single agreed definition of transdisciplinarity, which was noted by Martin (2017), a librarian, who also observed that it is an elusive concept. Contemporaneously but independently, Julie Thompson Klein (2017, p. 29–30), a leading transdisciplinary scholar, described four different ways in which transdisciplinarity manifests, which she called trendlines. In brief they are: (1) the “systematic integration of knowledge,” (2) the development of “synthetic paradigms” such as general systems and sustainability, (3) “anti-disciplinarity” coupled with a quest for “sociopolitical justice,” and (4) problem solving with multiple disciplines and stakeholders “realized through mutual learning and a recursive approach to integration.”

This lack of clarity about transdisciplinarity means that, even if there was scope in libraries for subject specialists focused on transdisciplinarity, it would be hard for them to work out where to start and what to concentrate on. At this stage, they would also be unable to find guidance from the field of information science, which underpins the work of libraries and librarians, and which has not yet taken much interest in transdisciplinary approaches in academic research and education.

The time is therefore ripe for a concerted effort addressing how libraries can effectively assist academic institutions in the transitions that make room for and embed transdisciplinarity. There is a lot to do in individual libraries, in libraries as a collective, and in the information science field. Our focus is on individual libraries and what library–academic partnerships can achieve, although we end by reflecting on wider issues.

In this Comment, we present four lessons distilled from our experience to stimulate others to think about how they might work together in embedding transdisciplinarity in library practice in their institutions. Our experience is based on a library–academic collaboration to produce a library guide (abbreviated to LibGuide) that is a subject guide to transdisciplinary problem solving. We begin by briefly describing the LibGuide, which we believe is a world-first, as well as being an example of a practical resource that libraries can provide. We briefly discuss how we dealt with the definitional and trendline issues. We then move on to the four lessons:

  1. 1.

    Exploit your context and seize opportunities.

  2. 2.

    Find a task and framework that suits your purposes.

  3. 3.

    Adapt to, and make the most of, your means.

  4. 4.

    Be in it for the long haul.

A LibGuide for transdisciplinary problem solving

LibGuides are commonly developed by libraries to showcase resources on particular subjects and to provide a consistent pedagogical approach to these subject-specific resources (Bergstrom-Lynch, 2019; Burton and Foley, 2018; Morris and Del Bosque, 2010; note that LibGuides are a product of the Springshare company). To develop the Australian National University (ANU) LibGuide, we established a cross-university working group, inviting a member from each of the (then) seven ANU colleges to participate, along with key library staff and the academic charged with leading the implementation of transdisciplinary problem solving in undergraduate teaching at ANU (CB). At that time, the colleges covered arts and social sciences; Asia and the Pacific; business and economics; engineering, computing, and cybernetics; health and medicine; law; and science.

The LibGuide on transdisciplinary problem solving that we produced aims to provide introductory materials for students and academic staff across the university on all aspects of transdisciplinary problem solving. The intention is that multiple entry points will allow users from any of the university’s disciplines or fields to find materials they can relate to. We deliberately ignored definitions, instead concentrating on the problem-solving trendline described by Klein (2017). Therefore, the LibGuide is structured around a framework that was developed to support undergraduate teaching (the ANU Framework for Transdisciplinary Problem Solving; Bammer et al. 2023), and that deals with core elements of transdisciplinary problem solving as: change-oriented, systemic, context-based, pluralistic, interactive and integrative. Brief descriptions of each follow. The descriptions also highlight how two characteristics—change-oriented and interactive—are divided into four and three, respectively, topics in the LibGuide.

  1. 1.

    Change-oriented

    Transdisciplinary problem solving is used to improve understanding for improved action. This change-oriented approach requires:

    • An appreciation of the complexity of change processes, such as the different roles for social movements, choice architecture and individual change.

    • Effective decision making, which accommodates diverse perspectives and is based on a shared vision and research evidence.

    • Research implementation to provide a strong evidence base.

    • Taking into account unknowns that might lead to adverse unintended consequences and nasty surprises.

    Hence “change-oriented” in the LibGuide is divided into four topics, namely change, decision making, research implementation and unknowns.

  2. 2.

    Systemic

    Transdisciplinary problem solving is unnecessary for simple cause–and–effect-type problems, but is instead required for problems that are systemic, including where components are interdependent and interact, where feedback and leverage points come into play, where boundary-setting is crucial, and where switching between views of wholes and parts is essential for understanding and action.

  3. 3.

    Context-based

    The way problems manifest and options for addressing problems depend on historical, political, cultural and other big-picture circumstances.

  4. 4.

    Pluralistic

    Effectively understanding and addressing systemic and context-based problems requires recognition that there are multiple ways of seeing the world and that for any problem there will be different ways of understanding and responding to it.

  5. 5.

    Interactive

    Key to transdisciplinary problem solving is finding ways to engage a diverse array of expertise and perspectives. In the LibGuide, “interactive” is therefore divided into three topics: teamwork, stakeholder engagement, and effective communication.

  6. 6.

    Integrative

    Developing a shared approach to defining and acting on the problem requires synthesis of the diverse perspectives, while also recognising that there will generally be outliers that cannot be comfortably integrated.

The six key characteristics of transdisciplinary problem solving are therefore addressed through 11 topics, as described above. In addition, introductions to transdisciplinarity as a whole are covered by the 12th topic “General Resources.” Although the LibGuide concentrates mostly on the problem-solving trendline for transdisciplinarity described earlier (Klein, 2017), it also includes key references for the other trendlines. In addition, being mindful of other approaches to tackling complex problems, we included their key references, especially from convergence research, systems thinking, action research, and post-normal science.

We also recognised that, although books and journals are the mainstay of academic work, some users might be more attracted to blogs, videos, and popular articles, so we included such resource types, which are now also commonly incorporated into library holdings. We sought to keep the LibGuide manageable for users with fewer than 20 items in any category and, because there were many more potential resources, we had to be highly selective. Journals, however, were an exception in that we sought to identify all major relevant journals, largely because there are still relatively few of them.

The structure of the LibGuide is shown in the screenshot in Fig. 1 and the LibGuide is available at https://libguides.anu.edu.au/transdisciplinary-problem-solving.

Fig. 1
figure 1

A screenshot of the ANU Library Guide to Transdisciplinary Problem Solving, illustrating the framework for organising resources and the key types of resources.

Full size image

We now move on to the lessons learnt in undertaking a library-academic partnership to collaboratively develop the LibGuide. The lessons are focused largely on making the most of what transdisciplinary academics, individual libraries and librarians have to offer. Suggestions for collections of libraries and the information science field are in the section on broader ramifications. It is beyond the scope of this Comment, as well as being too early in the process, to evaluate the LibGuide and its impact.

Lesson #1. Exploit your context and seize opportunities

Context defines what is possible and will vary among academic institutions, as they decide how to approach transdisciplinarity. In addition, opportunities may not always be obvious and, as Louis Pasteur is reported to have observed “chance only favours the mind which is prepared” (Vallery-Radot, 1915, p.79). These points are illustrated through the circumstances and opportunities relevant in our case at ANU. One of our key reasons for writing this comment is to prepare more minds.

We had the good fortune to be working in a very auspicious context in that the ANU leadership had decided in 2022 to reform the undergraduate education curriculum, with one of three pillars being the introduction of the “Capability to Employ Discipline-based Knowledge in Transdisciplinary Problem Solving” across the full breadth of ANU’s undergraduate cohort, starting with the 2025 undergraduate intake. Transdisciplinarity was therefore well and truly on the agenda, and it was in a whole-of-university context.

Our working group had been preceded by another working group, with the same chair (GB) and some overlapping members (CB, TN-F). That first working group had developed an implementation plan, including the ANU Framework for Transdisciplinary Problem Solving, which provided the structure for the LibGuide, as described earlier.

The LibGuide working group was established to take advantage of an opportunity presented to the first working group, which had received an unsolicited offer of assistance from the University Librarian, and which noted in its final report that:

“… there would also be substantial benefit in academics working with the ANU Library to develop a repository of books, journal articles, grey literature, videos, podcasts and blog posts relevant to transdisciplinary problem solving. Existing educational resources that ANU and other academics have developed could also be included in such a repository. Roxanne Missingham, University Librarian, has expressed enthusiasm for such collaboration which would build on the ANU Open Research repository.” (Bammer et al., 2022, p. 28)

The collaboration arose from the coming together of two “prepared minds:” that of the University Librarian, who saw an opportunity to expand library services to the ANU community, and that of the working group chair, who had been sensitised to the important role of libraries and information science by a colleague many years before (Anderson and Bammer, 2005). Under different circumstances, the Library may not have been proactive or the offer made may have fallen on unreceptive ears.

Taking a global perspective, context and opportunity will vary widely, influencing not only the human and financial means that are available, but also the types of problems that are priorities and, as we address next, the frameworks, concepts and methods that are favoured.

Lesson #2 Find a task and framework that suits your purposes

Effective collaboration requires more than favourable circumstances and opportunity. It also requires a meaningful task that would benefit from collaboration. LibGuides, reading lists and other ways of gaining a foothold into the literature on transdisciplinarity are obvious tasks that are likely to fit many contexts and opportunities. The task needs to be coupled with a framework that is not only congruent with the goals of the task, but that also provides guidance through the murkiness around the concept of transdisciplinarity.

In our case, the framework preceded the task. ANU had decided to implement education for the “Capability to Employ Discipline-based Knowledge in Transdisciplinary Problem Solving” through a wide suite of existing and new courses, which individually would mostly only tackle elements of transdisciplinary problem solving. For example, one course might tackle teamwork and change, whereas another might tackle cross-disciplinary integration, and another systemic approaches to problems. Even courses that aimed to tackle transdisciplinarity as a whole would be limited in what they could achieve by the inevitable restrictions on available time. A key task for the ANU Framework for Transdisciplinary Problem Solving was to highlight how the pieces provided by individual courses were part of a larger and coherent whole. The framework aimed to provide an end goal for educators and students, in other words, at the end of their undergraduate degrees, ANU graduates should be equipped to understand and address the whole framework, even though individual courses might only address particular aspects.

We therefore designed the task around the framework and end goal for ANU’s undergraduate education and decided on an overarching set of curated resources (i.e., a LibGuide) to build a common understanding around the ANU Framework for Transdisciplinary Problem Solving. We also recognised that many ANU academics were interested, but not particularly well-versed, in transdisciplinarity and would need accessible entry points to develop and integrate transdisciplinary problem-solving skills into their course design.

In addition to producing the LibGuide, there were three other tasks. First was strengthening the expertise of Library staff in transdisciplinary problem solving, allowing them to better support the university’s efforts. Second was to expand the Library’s collection of resources relevant to transdisciplinary problem solving. The third was to validate and build the ANU community of educators focused on transdisciplinary problem solving. We return to these under lessons 3 and 4.

Each library will serve a specific academic community with its own priorities and framework preferences. The resource produced will need to accommodate whichever of Klein’s trendlines that is favoured, as well as varying experience with transdisciplinarity.

Lesson #3 Adapt to, and make the most of, your means

The ability to achieve the set task will be influenced by the financial, human and other available means. A useful aphorism is “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” In other words, do what you can with the means that you have, rather than fretting about something better that you do not have the means to undertake.

In our case, there was no dedicated funding to develop a LibGuide, but we did have four critical means:

  1. 1.

    A Library willing to do things differently in developing the LibGuide and to allocate the time of key staff to achieve this.

  2. 2.

    A Library willing to commit funding to expanding its collection, adding resources recommended by the working group that were not already in its holdings, specifically 23 newly purchased books and 12 new editions or e-books of existing holdings for the 114 books among the 449 resources in the LibGuide.

  3. 3.

    A working group chair who was sure-footed, intellectually and politically, in approaching transdisciplinarity and other approaches to complex problems, as well as the ANU Framework for Transdisciplinary Problem Solving.

  4. 4.

    A motivated working group that was comfortable doing something that had not been tried before, embarking on a joint “learning journey.”

In early discussions it soon became evident that the usual way in which a LibGuide is developed, at least at ANU, was going to need modification of some key steps. First, rather than library staff driving the process based on needs ascertained from the communities they serve, the starting point was a future anticipated need, driven by a library–academic staff collaboration.

Second, the usual process would be that a subject specialist librarian is tasked with searching for and assembling content, which is a wide selection of authoritative materials that demonstrate the breadth and quality of the ANU Library’s collection. The librarian is likely to consult with relevant academics and use course syllabi and reading lists, research webpages and other materials. The main modification was that the work of searching for and assembling content was undertaken by the academics in the working group, who were individual volunteers, rather than formal representatives of their area in the university. The starting point was resources selected from a database compiled over years by the working group chair. The working group members then added to the selected resources, mostly focusing on those relevant to their ANU college. They used a range of methods:

  • consulting their own databases of resources (4 members);

  • searching the literature (4 members);

  • reviewing resources provided to students in relevant courses, either by themselves or others (3 members);

  • asking colleagues (3 members);

  • happenstance, e.g., noting a resource in a seminar or a casual conversation (1 member).

The work was scheduled over a year, with the working group tackling one topic each month. Once the references for the topic had been assembled, the group met to discuss them, with final decisions about inclusion made by the chair. The Library staff members of the working group reviewed the list, made purchasing decisions, and uploaded the references into the LibGuide shell.

The final modification was that the review process involved internal and external academic colleagues, rather than the usual review only within the university. The review process strongly supported what the working group had achieved.

Individual and group reflections on the process highlighted the value in our case of the leadership provided by the working group chair, especially:

  • recognised expertise in transdisciplinary problem solving;

  • providing a starting set of resources for the LibGuide, so that working group members did not have to start with a blank page; plus helping working group members figure out where best to slot in their contributions;

  • ability to encourage respectful work across disciplinary boundaries, ensuring that no-one was marginalised and encouraging discussion of uncertainties and challenges to contributing;

  • chunking the task into realistic and manageable pieces, plus gentle but persistent “driving” to elicit working group member contributions, maintain motivation and momentum, and keep the process focused.

By illustrating the specific means we had at our disposal and how we made the most of them, our aim in this lesson is to encourage others to tailor means, tasks, opportunities and context. For example, if there is no recognised leader, this provides openings for those with leadership ambitions to step up or for highly collaborative teams with dispersed leadership to form. Having allocated funding would allow more detailed searches and consultation to be undertaken in assembling resources. Harnessing the efforts of academic staff who are formal representatives of their areas, rather than individual volunteers, can aid in implementation.

Lesson #4 Be in it for the long haul

Producing a LibGuide or similar resource requires those involved to invest significant time, energy and expertise. For the investment to pay off, there also needs to be commitment to the often less glamorous tasks of:

  • promoting and facilitating uptake by the intended audience

  • keeping the resource up-to-date.

These tasks need to be embedded in the institution’s routine processes, which is likely to require involving new people, finding new (or repurposing existing) means and adapting to new and changing contexts.

In our case, a critical step in embedding the promotion and maintenance of the LibGuide into routine processes was the Library’s appointment of a new staff member with designated responsibility for these tasks, taking over from one of the authors (NC). A modified working group will provide on-going academic support, especially in updating the LibGuide.

In addition, we used a wide range of activities to promote the LibGuide, which was completed in time to support those restructuring courses (or developing new ones) for the planned 2025 introduction of the graduate attribute “Capability to Employ Discipline-based Knowledge in Transdisciplinary Problem Solving.” An important substrate was establishing a university-wide community of practice in teaching transdisciplinary problem solving, as this provided a targeted audience to interact with. Particularly important activities were:

  • inviting relevant educators to review the draft LibGuide;

  • running a workshop for interested educators;

  • formally tabling the completed LibGuide at the University’s Learning and Teaching Committee, which comprises (among others) the Associate Deans of Education, who oversee all education-related matters in their colleges and who are therefore key to the implementation of the transdisciplinary problem-solving graduate attribute;

  • incorporating promotion of the LibGuide into other activities as appropriate. For example, one of us (NC) had regular meetings discussing Library matters with the university’s (then) Centre for Learning and Teaching and ensured that the LibGuide was included whenever there was something of interest to report. Another of us (CB) promoted the LibGuide in multiple discussions during various facets of implementing the graduate attribute;

  • working with the Library’s (then) communications team to give the LibGuide prominence on the Library webpages and to produce a flyer that was distributed online and in hard copy to anyone who might be interested, often in conjunction with the activities above.

We received informal positive feedback from many of these activities. Other planned activities, such as a series of videos about the LibGuide, were stymied by a significant change in context, when the university found itself in a dire funding situation leading to cuts and restructures, including disbanding the Library’s communications team.

The on-going challenge for us—and lesson for others—is to find ways to catalyse a virtuous cycle of increasing academic and student demand for library resources on transdisciplinarity and the library’s ability to meet that demand.

Broader ramifications

As described in the introduction, enlisting libraries and the field of information science in advancing transdisciplinarity and other approaches to tackling complex societal and environmental problems is stymied by challenges in how libraries work and the current status of information science, as well as in the conceptual murkiness of transdisciplinarity and other approaches. We have illustrated how change can be effected in an individual library–academic collaboration, extracting lessons that may be helpful for others. However, important as change in individual libraries is, it is not enough, and we conclude this Comment by suggesting possibilities for libraries as a collective, as well as for the field of information science, with all requiring library–academic collaboration.

Libraries as a collective can be instrumental in bringing together the experiences of individual library–academic partnerships, teasing out different ways of being alert to opportunities in overall context and in chance happenings; of aligning tasks, frameworks and desired outcomes; of making the most of the people, funding and other available means; and of aiming for long-term involvement; as well as finding new lessons. Particularly useful would be taking a global perspective, as this would amplify the murkiness of transdisciplinarity and other approaches, differences in individual library practices, and the complexities of societal and environmental problems, as well as providing fresh insights into tackling these challenges (see for example, Bursztyn and Purushothaman, 2022; Haghdoost et al., 2021; Marín Vanegas, 2023; Odume et al., 2021).

Such a global perspective would provide valuable input for critical work in the information science field, allowing advances to be made on a global scale, rather than being determined in the Global North for export to the Global South, ignoring what the Global South has to offer. As highlighted in the introduction, particular challenges that can only be addressed through information science collaboration with transdisciplinary (and other) academics working on complex problems involve how library resources are organised and how to support subject librarians focused on transdisciplinarity (plus other approaches to complex problems). Such collaborations are also central to getting maximum benefits out of adopting artificial intelligence and other new technologies in addressing the challenges.

We see an exciting future for library–academic partnerships, not only in developing practical tools to support transdisciplinary education and research, as we illustrate in this Comment, but also in tackling the large, challenging issues associated with institutionalising, into academic practice, transdisciplinarity and other approaches to tackling complex societal and environmental problems.