Remodelling the Research Library: the Institution and the Extra-Institutional Agency

1. Remodelling the Research Library: the Institution and the Extra-Institutional Agency John A MacColl University of St Andrews RLUK Members’ Meeting, University of Aberdeen, 30 March 2012

2. The Agencies: a Classification Funding Bodies Record supply • COPAC • OCLC Mission Groups • JISC Aggregation Repositories • RLUK • SCONUL • LIBER • 94 Group • ORLP • SCURL • COPAC • WorldCat • Hathi Trust • Europeana • EThOS Consultancy Organisations Scale Tool Providers • RIN (?) • ORLP • RLUK • EDINA • MIMAS • OCLC • BL Shared Print Repositories • UKRR

3. Things only we can do Things we shouldn’t have to do any more? • Operate our own services • Catalogue our UDC • Promote our UDC • Get our academics to support us • Win resources from the University • Deploy our own statistics and perfomance indicators • Fund-raise for our own developments • Run our own budget • Succession-plan • Keep our own staff motivated • Run a programme of cultural events • Host and run our LMS • Host and run a discovery system • Purchase and maintain our own servers • Derive our own raw statistics • Catalogue our current material • Add records for current e-resources to our catalogue • Maintain our own institutional Library store

4. Infrastructure The Institution Non-UDC Cataloguing Discovery provision LMS Repository provision Redundant print storage Digitisation Digital storage Digital preservation • COPAC • WorldCat • Europeana • WorldShare • Hathi • UKRR • Be ‘The Library’ (again?)

5. Who’s got the power? Institutional libraries acting collectively can be powerful in directing or creating new agencies, eg OCLC, The institutional library JISC Collections, SCONUL Performance Indicators, Hathi Trust, UKRR, the ILL network, SPARC (?)

6. Agencies provide scale to institutional power • Webscale is important for discovery, but not for everything. • US: strength lies in its homogeneous national culture. Weakened by lack of national infrastructure. • OCLC: can harness the world, but then needs to (learn to) devolve. • Europe: weakened – for our purposes - by the diversity of its national cultures, and within them its national research library cooperative cultures. • UK: enough diversity and strength to be internationally successful, but weakened by agency competition and poor agenda coordination. • Scotland: enough agenda coordination to be a successful small nation, but weakened by insufficient diversity and strength.

7. What does it mean for us? • Ask not ‘What can these agencies do for us?’ But rather • ‘What do we want?’ • Non-UDC Cataloguing • Discovery provision • LMS • Repository provision • Redundant print storage • Digitisation • Digital storage • Digital preservation • ‘How much do wehave to spend?’ • Organise our buyingpower! • Cut through the agencycompetition and poor agenda coordination • Seize the post-JISC moment • We have 40 years of best practice

8. Sorting out the power • Each institution has the power to choose the right agencies to lever the right scale in order to make possible the right infrastructure … • … so that it can be the Library it wishes to be • Institutions making the same choices collectively have even more power • Agencies have to act!

9. A final thought • Whither the 94 Group Libraries? • Collective power of an enlarged RLUK? Lancaster University University of Leicester Loughborough University University of ReadingSchool of Oriental and African Studies University of Surrey University of Sussex University of Bath Birkbeck, University of London University of East Anglia University of EssexGoldsmiths, University of London Institute of Education, University of London Royal Holloway, University of London

10. Thank You!