I’d Rather be a Hammer than a Nail

John MacCollChair, Research Libraries UK

University of Warwick Library. Symposium, 19 November 2015

Research Libraries and Clout

 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

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

Prelude: Glasgow

study environments; unique & distinctive collections; store services; chat services; local discovery services; Library brand and reach; management of research profile; researcher support

Above- campu

s

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- campu

s

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)

70s & 80s: Cooperation Underway: Metadata Infrastructure DevelopmentLate 1960s OCLC

1970s WorldCat; RLG; BLLD; BLAISE

1980s Regional cataloguing cooperatives;CURL Database

90s and 00s: Cooperation Challenged: Erosion of Financial Control

1990s RLIN; COPAC; E-journals; Big DealsLANL Preprint Server; arXiv

2000s Open Access (Institutional Repositories); House of Commons Science & Technology Committee report

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 (?)

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

Serv

ices

Colla

bora

tions

Optimisation

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

Prophets of Scale IRick 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)

Prophets of Scale IIBrian 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)

Prophets of Scale IIIJohn 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)

1st Forum of International Research Library Organisations • London, March 2016

(to begin with)

• Bodies with status, brand, authority – yet nationally-bounded

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

Taking Bold, Disruptive StepsFrom 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?

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

I'd rather feel the earth beneath my feet

Yes I would

If I only could, I surely would. 

Thank You!