Meeting the specialized needs of creator communities in academia—the people who apply knowledge to create things—is an opportunity for libraries to increase their impact. Students who are studying to become creators, whether they be engineers, designers, or artists, exist and work in two distinct overlapping worlds. They move between the textually oriented academic world, where research leads to carefully constructed arguments, and the practitioner world, where research leads to embodied designs and creations. To succeed, student creators must master both worlds, and libraries are positioned to enable their success.

The book aims to include chapters that focus on a wide range of creators in disciplines like engineering, architecture, design, creative writing, and the arts. By bringing together creators as a group, we hope to reveal shared commonalities of experience, practice, and information needs.

This edited volume will present chapters informed by the unique information needs of creators across many disciplines. These studies will demonstrate ways that academic librarians can implement services for creative practitioners in areas such as: service design, outreach, library spaces, collection building, and information literacy. By better understanding the creator community, librarians can develop more relevant and meaningful services and more powerfully connect with these students.