Librarians’ roles and responsibilities in managing data within academic libraries: A role-based data governance model

The rapid growth of data-intensive research and digital transformation has significantly expanded the data management responsibilities of academic libraries. Academic librarians are increasingly expected to manage, curate and provide data to support institutional reporting, research activities and governance. However, their data-related roles remain unclear and inconsistently defined across institutions. Guided by two research questions, this study adopts a qualitative case study approach using semi-structured interviews with academic librarians from five research universities in Malaysia to examine how librarians' data-related roles are defined and structurally interconnected across the data lifecycle. The findings identify four interconnected roles: data curator, data provider, data custodian and coordinator. These roles form an integrated governance workflow rather than functioning in isolation, with librarians contributing to technical data management, institutional reporting, governance and strategic decision-making. The findings further demonstrate how data move across roles to support reporting, preservation and reuse. This study contributes by proposing a role-based data governance model that explain how data-related responsibilities are embedded and interconnected within academic library contexts, highlighting the need for stronger governance frameworks, integrated systems and continuous professional development.