Collaborative Resource Management:
Collection Care in the Community?
Mike Mertens, Deputy Director,
RLUK
We have been here before...
Parry Committee 1967
lack of evidence on the ‘adequacy of academic library collections to meet
the needs of faculty members and research students’
Atkinson Report 1976
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recommends ‘self-renewing’ libraries, with low-use material being discarded
to make way for new material
explicit assumption that discarded material would be available from BL
Computer Board (John Forty) 1988

recommends hub and spoke model of regional research libraries
Follett Report 1993

“develop networks and groupings of institutions based on particular centres
to support particular subjects…”
Anderson Report 1996

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avoid unnecessary duplication in acquisition and retention
establish local and regional cooperative arrangements
Research Support Libraries Programme 2002
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(Source: Michael Jubb, RIN)
Who or what needs the care?
The Collections?
Or the Community?
RSLP Redux 1 - Some thoughts from 2002...
The number of institutions involved in RSLP = 500
Conservation: ‘We failed completely to work out a viable
economic model.’
Cross-sectoral collaboration was more difficult than hoped
Sustainability: project funding is great, but what happens
next? There is a need to work out viable business models to
maintain and develop what has been started on the
projects; we have to get to grip with it because no more
money will come our way...
There is a need to work towards a shared digital and print
infrastructure
RSLP Redux 2 - Some further thoughts from 2002...
Collaboration has to take place because of the
transforming quality of modern technologies; it has
to happen in terms of resources, policies and
leadership (since then Google, Napster, P2P...)
“It will be suggested to set up ‘Body X’ which will be a
‘cooperative’ which is not intended to run the
system, but rather to be a facilitatory organization.”
(eventually this was the RIN, now a private
consulting body).
RSLP Redux 3 - Some final thoughts from 2002...
What would ‘Body X’ do?
Play a leading role in defining and implementing a national
strategy (digitisation, digital preservation etc…);
Undertake some tasks on behalf of the libraries, e.g. site
licensing;
Play a leading role in the debate on Scholarly
Communications, SPARC etc.;
Play a role in the identification of contents; e.g. what to
digitize, e-collections, e-science;
Play a leading role in establishing catalogues and search
engines: UK NUC, SUNCAT etc.
Investigate the possibility of deep sharing in certain areas...
A moment of clarity from 2012?
The Community is now
“Body X”!
Does this activity need a community?
What will it take to create a community
around this?
Long-term sustainability means that the
emphasis now has to be on community
leadership.
If you were part of this community, what
support would you expect, for yourselves
and for your users?
Paradox 1: Is a community that is prefabricated an authentic one?
Paradox 2 In times of financial duress,
overcoming the conviction of being
precisely unable to participate in joint
activities on account of cost factors when
sharing burdens would exactly help.
Ask not so much what RLUK (or others) can do for
you, rather state boldly what you can do (and
already are doing) for yourselves
Does anyone need to convince you of the utility of
community action here? If not, nobody is
stopping you!
The old chestnut of a (distributed) national
research collection still holds a kernel of truth
What if new tools means it's now easy (or plain
unavoidable – the Legal Deposit libraries will not
be a last resort)?
Does or can RLUK and others still have any
expectations or demands?
(Shhh...Standardization...?)
After the stirring landing speech, what kind
of ammunition do you need?
Why have previous attempts at the national
research collection beachhead failed?
What have been the tank traps?
The long road to Berlin...or how to beat the
Red Army of print decline to the
bibliographic Oder?
Are the Allies all speaking with one voice?
Would our own Preservation Potsdam
last?
Where are the blown bridges?
What's the smallest effective sharing unit?
The national print collection is as much the
collective co-ordination and participation
which would permit these issues to be
more profoundly addressed in a structured
way, as it is the absolute or relative
discoverable measure of what exists in
print in our collections
The fact is that there is a crisis, the national
heritage is at risk and it cannot be secured
on the basis of existing resources. Yet that
is not the whole answer. The conservation
problem is a national one and it will not be
solved by any one library...It will depend
on cooperation, on the goodwill of libraries
working together.
Ratcliffe, F.W. Preservation policies and conservation in British libraries. British Library (1984) p. 67
So, we have heard all this before, and we
have survived the predicted crises. But
these were perhaps fluctuations of fortune
in the Cold War between print and digital.
We shall not be faced with the fixed lines
of 1945 forever, however – consider now
whether the preservation of print may be
looking at a “Berlin Wall” moment.
What has your institutional investment in
print been? Your print portfolio may be
some of the only unique content you have.
But is the rate of interest on book bonds
now seemingly lower than it's ever been?
Are we only to seek liquidity in terms of
digital surrogates?
Can we have both? (According to Ithaka
work, researchers still want – 2009).
Mike Mertens, Deputy Director, RLUK
[email protected]
@RLUK_Mike