Impactful academic research plays a stellar role in society, pressing to ask the question of how one measures the impact created by different areas of academic research. Measuring the societal, cultural, economic and scientific impact of research is currently the priority of the National Science Foundation, European Commission and several research funding agencies. The recently concluded United Kingdom’s national research quality exercise, the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014, which piloted impact assessment as part of the overall evaluation offers a lens to view how impact of research in different disciplines can be measured. Overall research quality was assessed through quality of outputs, ‘impact’ and research environment. We performed two studies using the REF 2014 as a case study. The first study on 363 Impact Case Studies (ICSs) submitted in 5 research areas (UoAs) reveals that, in general, the impact scores were constructed upon a combination of factors i.e. quantity of quartile-one (Q1) publications, quantity and value of grants/income, number of researchers stated in the ICSs, spin-offs created, discoveries/patents and presentation of esteem data, informing researchers/ academics of the factors to consider in order to achieve a better impact score in research impact assessments. However, there were differences among disciplines in terms of the role played by the factors in achieving their overall scores for the ICSs. The outcome of this study is thus a set of impact indicators, and their relationship with the overall score of impact of research in different disciplines as determined in REF2014, which would in the first instance provide some answers to impact measures that would be useful for researchers in different disciplines. The second study extracts the general themes of impact reported by universities by performing a word frequency analysis in all the ICSs submitted in the five chosen research areas, which were substantially varied owing to their fields.

Purpose: This article seeks to propose a new vision for public libraries in the digital age.Design/methodology/approach: This conceptual paper is based on an understanding of the recent developments in ICT, internet and digital libraries; and also on the authors' personal experience in research and development in library and information science – especially in relation to public libraries – and digital libraries.Findings: The study argues that currently there are no proper mechanisms for capturing, preserving and disseminating community knowledge, and proposes that public libraries in the digital age should take a new role whereby they should act not only as a gateway to knowledge, but also as a platform facilitating the creation of, and access to, local community knowledge. Proposes a model for PL2.0 where public libraries can take on this new role to build a network of community knowledge.Research limitations/implications: The paper proposes a conceptual model for the second generation of public libraries, and further studies are required to test and implement the model.Practical implications: The paper proposes that the new role of public libraries will be to shift from solely providing access to knowledge to acting as a platform for the storage and dissemination of local community knowledge within the global context created by twenty‐first century digital technologies.Originality/value: The proposed model will bring in a “cultural change” by giving a new role to public libraries in preserving and disseminating community knowledge.