Warwick Library Symposium: Forward from 50 John MacColl, St Andrews and RLUK

1. I’d Rather be a Hammer than
a Nail
John MacColl
Chair, Research Libraries UK
University of Warwick Library. Symposium, 19 November 2015
Research Libraries and Clout

2. I'd rather be a hammer than a
nail.
Yes I would
If I only could, I surely would.
(Paul Simon 'El Condor Pasa' 1970)
Epigraph

3. Contents
• Prelude
• Responsibility of Research Libraries
• 50 Years of Research Library Cooperation
• Pressing Current Issue: the Open Access Conundrum
• Level & Scale: the Collaboration Impetus
• Governance at Scale

4. Prelude: Glasgow

5. study environments; unique & distinctive collections; store
services; chat services; local discovery services; Library
brand and reach; management of research profile;
researcher support
Above-
campus
collaboration agenda; digitised corpus; global metadata
infrastructure; shared print; preservation layer; open access
layer; data layer
Research Library Responsibility: In-Campus
and Above-Campus
In-
campus
John P. Wilkin: ‘Some of a library’s work can naturally be done more efficiently in a shared, networked
context. Other work is best done locally. The best example of appropriately local work is the creation
and management of spaces … The best example of an activity that can be done most appropriately in a
networked context is curation … a library’s collection is not owned solely by the library, but by the
society or culture that has collected it and put it in the library in the first place.’ (2015)

6. 70s & 80s: Cooperation Underway:
Metadata Infrastructure Development
Late 1960s OCLC
1970s WorldCat; RLG; BLLD; BLAISE
1980s Regional cataloguing cooperatives;
CURL Database

7. 90s and 00s: Cooperation Challenged:
Erosion of Financial Control
1990s RLIN; COPAC;
E-journals; Big Deals
LANL Preprint Server; arXiv
2000s Open Access (Institutional Repositories);
House of Commons Science & Technology
Committee report

8. 00s and 10s: Cooperation Resurgent? Mass
Digitisation, Preservation Solutions & Open
Access Gold/Green Tug-of-War
00s Internet Archive; Trove; Europeana; Hathi;
Portico/CLOCKSS; PubMedCentral; SHERPA tools
10s Shared Print; Digital Public Library of America;
research funder interventions (Finch Report); Harvard
Model Licence; UK-SCL (?)

9. After 50 Years of Research Library
Collaboration? Discuss
Metadata infrastructure
Digitised outputs
Scholarly Publishing procurement
DiscoveryShared Print
National Digitisation Strategies
Archive Layer Management
Open Access delivery
ServicesCollaborations
Optimisation

10. MPDL White Paper Dialogue: Translation
With goodwill on both sides, premise is
correct; cost of pure gold is stable
Premise is incorrect because of scholarly
market forces; increase in publications;
subscription publishing subsidises gold;
Europe subsidises Asia/Pacific
It could work if we dictated the terms
But you don’t – so knock yourselves out! We
do, and we have shareholders to take care of
Libraries
Libraries
Publishers
Publishers

11. Prophets of Scale I
Rick Luce: ‘We must do much more than aggregate and provide access
to digital scientific information … Our job now is to wire people’s brains
together so that sharing, reasoning, and collaboration become part of
everyday work.’ (1998)
Lorcan Dempsey: ‘Moving to the network level … libraries are about to
enter the third main phase of their networked existence. The first was
the introduction of shared cataloging and resource sharing. The second
was the move to an external model for journal literature. I speculate
that the third will be more far-reaching as libraries work in a flat
network world. We will see greater reorganization around shared
network platforms and a strong focus on creating services which are
specialised for local audiences. Libraries will have to pull together plural
diversified resources, and make them available in ways that match
users’ preferred consumption styles.’ (2006)

12. Prophets of Scale II
Brian Lavoie & Constance Malpas: ‘Stewardship of the
scholarly record will become an enterprise guided … by
conscious coordination. We define conscious coordination as
a strategy of deliberate engagement with—and growing
dependence on—cooperative agreements, characterized by
increased reliance on network intelligence (eg domain
models, identifiers, ontologies, metadata) and global data
networks. Stewardship strategies based on conscious
coordination involve an acceleration of an already
perceptible transition away from relatively autonomous
local collections to ones built on networks of cooperation
across many organizations’ (2015)

13. Prophets of Scale III
John P Wilkin: ‘The scale of library collaboration is changing. It is
changing with economic pressures because we are no longer able
to afford to do in isolation what we can do more cost-effectively
together. It is changing with unforeseen opportunities as we craft
new models of collaborative collection development and
management. It is changing with new priorities as we turn our
attention to increasingly intensive partnerships with the
communities of which we are a part, and away from those
isolated and isolating activities that occupied us in the past.’
(2015)
Ralf Schimmer, Kai Karin Geschuhn, Andreas Vogler: ‘The world’s
research organizations, together with their libraries, need to act
jointly and with some coordination, with the key aim of shifting
the money out of the subscription system and so that it can be re-
invested in open access publishing.’ (2015)

14. 1st Forum of International Research Library
Organisations
• London, March 2016
(to begin with)
• Bodies with status, brand, authority – yet nationally-bounded

15. Aims and Objectives
• How to organise our shared activities at international scale in order to
advance the cause of research librarianship in the service of scholarship?
• Produce a statement of shared principles
• Whom and what do we trust? Can we give guidance across countries?
• Concept of the optimised research library
• Its service components
• The international infrastructure and collaborative machinery that makes
them work effectively
• The legal framework
• The functional interoperability
• FIRLO: a policy body – with leverage (ie clout)
• Leadership

16. Taking Bold, Disruptive Steps
From the SHEDL or Nesli model
• ‘Let’s all agree to this deal before it disappears’
To the UK Scholarly Communications Licence model
• Collective step to reduce ‘First Mover Disadvantage’
• ‘Let’s all sign up at once’
And the MPDL White Paper
• Is there a first step for us there?
• With shared international policy, and leverage, we avoid the ‘Prisoner’s
Dilemma’
• ‘Let’s all pay (our price) for gold at once’
• Plan B?

17. Governance at Scale
• There are many strong players: value-add aggregators of metadata and of
digitised content; standards-making bodies; infrastructure providers; platform
providers; disciplinary OA repositories (publishing platforms)
• Eg WorldCat, Hathi, Internet Archive, Jisc, OpenAire, CASRAI, Portico, ArXiv
• Some make unique offers to our community
• We have mostly reacted to them, even where we have created them and are
involved in their governance
• We need to turn that round
• We must agree on what we need, and commission solutions from them
• We need to be able to take executive action at an international level

18. I'd rather feel the earth
beneath my feet
Yes I would
If I only could, I surely would.
Thank You!