Sustaining the digital library

1. Out of our comfort zones? Dark archives Skip/attic Car boot sale? Sustaining the digital library Connect people to add value boundaries Are we really risk averse? What is the DL’s collection? Okay, but why the library? scale data Keep VERY CLOSE to our research customers Digital libraries yes - but application development? EBI transnational marketing Promiscuous user Best enemy of good Who’s in the deepest doo-doo: libraries or library schools? Wheels are coming off the library things we’re doing workforce things that aren’t getting done Publishers’ digital libraries more CPD rather than postgraduate degrees? repositories mandates tensions Succession planning Role of middle managers NEW! alerts most useful for academics Domain - informatics Staff accommodation Humanities - science CIA world factbook example (Bunemann) Most cost effective not cheapest L&T - R Search within the book databases OA & IRs still new do it yourself.. BMC faculty of 1000 Cost of reading It’s WAR (with publishers)! Or is it? Discipline loyalty of academics peer review metadata Flickr Technology ? Stop doing stuff? Increasing costs

2. Sustaining the digital library    • What • How • Who   

3. eLib There was agreement across the board that theirs is a highly conservative and risk-averse profession. Nevertheless, they have taken on board a huge raft of changes in the ways in which they deliver services. Indeed, they have taken almost complete ownership of the changes which have occurred, showing a degree of imagination and breadth of vision which is striking. Such ownership explains the lack of memory of eLib, despite the fact that its aims and objectives have become so widely embedded. Impact study of the JISC eLib programme: final report. Duke & Jordan, 2006

4. An academic view The real heroes of the digital revolution in higher education are librarians; they are the people who have seen the farthest, done the most, accepted the hardest challenges, and demonstrated most clearly the benefits of digital information. In the process, they have turned their own field upside down and have revolutionized their own professional training. It is a testimony to their success that we take their achievement for granted. Edward L. Ayers and Charles M. Grisham EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 38, no. 6 (November/December 2003): 40–51

5. “Although these emerging, digital-age library services may be important, even critical, in the present era, there is no consensus on their significance to the future academic library—or even on whether they should remain as library functions carried out by librarians. “In addition, at this point, the discussion of the future of the academic library has been limited to librarians and has not widened, as it should, to involve the larger academic community. “Consequently, neither academic librarians nor others in the academy have a crisp notion of where exactly academic libraries fit in the emerging twenty-first-century information panoply…

6. “Because of the fundamental role that academic libraries have played in the past century, it is tremendously difficult to imagine a college or university without a library. “Considering the extraordinary pace with which knowledge is moving to the Web, it is equally difficult to imagine what an academic library will be and do in another decade. “But that is precisely what every college and university should undertake to determine. Given the implications of the outcome, this is not an agenda that librarians can, or should, accomplish alone”. Campbell, J. EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 1 (January/February 2006): 16–31

7. Recommendations • Digital data curation - a UK solution Local, national, international CURL/RUGIT shared services proposal • UK digitisation strategy • The “skunkworks” - a JISC/BL funded digital library institute • Follett 3: the Campbell imperative A UK workforce development review