Objective: Information sharing by academic libraries is a major and serious obstacle in preventing reproduction and helping to reduce costs and spending time of researchers at the national and international levels. In the library world, resource sharing means that you are collaborating with one or more libraries to maximize access to a larger array of resources by sharing the collections of the cooperating libraries or pooling funding to purchase shared digital resources. Todays, most libraries participate in some type of resource sharing, even when they may not be aware of it. Resource sharing provides the cooperating libraries with an opportunity to access materials from other libraries, which should result in a cost savings. This research was conducted with the aim of investigating the dimensions of information sharing model in Iranian academic libraries.
Methodology: The research is of an applied type, in terms of data gathering, it is exploratory using grounded theory method (qualitative phase) and cross-sectional survey (quantitative phase). The research community of the qualitative part includes all the experts of Knowledge and Information Science, who were selected by the targeted method of snowball, Delphi panel and brainstorming, and the statistical community of the quantitative part includes all the librarians of the universities of the country. In the qualitative part, data collection was done by document study and semi-structured exploratory interview. And in the quantitative section, a researcher-made multi-component questionnaire was used based on the findings of the quantitative section, and Cronbach's alpha and CVR were used for validity and reliability. The analysis was carried out in three main stages of open, axial and selective coding using Lisrel software.
Findings: The findings indicated that the appropriate model of information sharing in the academic libraries of the country consists of dimensions such as the use of technology, organizational policies, individual and group skills, environmental readiness, executive requirements and organizational and managerial prerequisites and 20 sub-components.
Conclusion: The obtained results indicate that the observed variables can well explain the hidden variable. Since the factor load of all the observed variables (components and indicators) are greater than 0.3, therefore there is a favorable relationship between the indicators (observed variable) with its own component (hidden variable) and between the components (observed variable) with all 6 dimensions (hidden variable). Therefore, by creating the necessaryinfrastructure in the field of information technology, culturalization, and process improvement, the organizational structure of information sharing can be implemented in academic libraries.