Community Participation in Digital Libraries for Sustainable Transdisciplinary Higher Education

The ever-changing digital library service can be considered as a burning issue of the institutions of higher learning as technological development is rapidly increasing, and end-users demands continue growing. At that, the current research questions the role of transdisciplinary collaboration in promoting the sustainability of the latter, suggesting that the community engagement serves as an intermediary construct. With the help of a structural equation modelling framework (SEM), the relationship between transdisciplinary collaboration, community engagement, and sustainability of digital libraries was investigated. The structural equation analysis showed that transdisciplinary collaboration had statistically significant positive effect on community engagement, but its immediate effect on digital library sustainability did not become significant. On the other hand, community involvement became a complete intermediary and this has defined a route through which transdisciplinary occupation connects with digital library sustainability. The findings suggest that interdepartmental cross-functional work makes sustainability majorly through encouraging active user engagement, incorporating feedback, and promoting interactive learning programs. Taken together, these results would add to the academic literature on the issues of digital library sustainability and higher-education and provide empirical support to the key role of community engagement to support digital library systems through collaborative governance. Practically, the implications that follow are institutional in nature, and thus imply designing user-friendly strategies coupled with interdepartmental collaboration to ensure the sustainability of digital library services and their effectiveness in the long-term.