5.1 Defining National Solutions for Managing Book Collections and Improving Digital Access
Creators: name: Grindley, Neil
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2016
Subjects: collections, solutions, digital, access

description: In 2014, Jisc published a <em>National Monograph Strategy Roadmap</em> which set out the vision that ‘within 5 years UK researchers and students will have unparalleled access to a distributed national research collection enabled by an open collaborative national infrastructure’. The Roadmap then listed a number of initiatives and investments that would be required to achieve the vision. Two years later, solid progress is being made towards putting in place a national infrastructure but the process and the difficulty of trying to transition from a ‘strategic vision’ towards a series of actionable, practical, affordable and realistic ‘solutions’ has been instructive. One of the principal difficulties has been to try and restrict and prioritise the problems on which to focus in a domain where it is almost impossible to talk about single issues (for example, metadata quality, or shared print solutions) without also tackling a whole series of dependent issues. This paper focuses on UK national solutions that are being pursued in response to two problem statements. The first focuses on the lack of data that is currently available that would enable libraries confidently to make data-driven decisions about the management of their digital and print book collections. The proposed solution to this first problem is to build a National Knowledgebase which will not only bring together a comprehensive aggregation of UK academic library catalogue data but also incorporate other types of data input, including usage data and availability data. The novel aspect to this aspiration is the range of functions that the Knowledgebase is expected to support and the anticipation of it nurturing a national concept of a ‘collective collection’. The paper will then address the second problem, namely that libraries want to ensure that researchers and learners have sustainable and convenient access to digital books but it is currently not obvious what is available or could be made available due to reasons ranging from copyright and licencing issues to sheer lack of availability of books digitally and in-commerce. We will share the experience of working in close collaboration with ten diverse UK universities over the last six months. Through this pilot project we aim to identify the key barriers that institutions face when trying to provide access to books. We will identify factors such as legal, financial and usage-driven issues and will then prioritise a range of solutions that address those requirements. The solutions will then be tested and rolled out according to short- and long-term needs. It is clear from early work that there is much to be gained from working with libraries to identify a long list of actual book titles that represent a problem for libraries in terms of access. This pragmatic approach typifies the distance we have come from the original strategic vision to the current focus on solutions and the urgency of pursuing them. <strong>Neil Grindley </strong>is the Head of Resource Discovery at Jisc. He is accountable for several Jisc discovery services and has strategic responsibility for ensuring that libraries, archives and their users have convenient and sustainable access to a wider range of relevant resources that support teaching, learning and research. Prior to this role, Neil was responsible for the Digital Preservation programme at Jisc. He has a background in art history and digital humanities. <strong>Paola Marchionni</strong> is the Head of Digital Resources for Teaching, Learning and Research at Jisc. She has responsibility for developing new models and partnerships for the funding of digital collections. She also works with colleagues on the promotion and discoverability of Jisc digital collections and on the development of appropriate impact assessment measures for digital resources. Her previous role at Jisc involved managing programme budgets ranging from £1m-£20m and focused on working with UK universities and other public and private organisations to undertake large scale digitisation of special and archival collections. She has a digital humanities background with a particular focus on literature and languages.