I’m at Survive or Thrive in Manchester for the next 2 days (http://www.surviveorthrive.org.uk)

Kicking off with Dan Greenstein, Vice Provost from the University of California. I’ve included quite a few quotes below, but as I’m live blogging these should be taken as paraphrasing not verbatim – and any mistakes are my own, not Dan’s!

A couple of quotes from Dan as he introduces his talk
“None of us put on our CVs that we wanted to oversee the downsizing of the University as we know it”
“I’m assuming there is going to be a whole lot of hurt”

Need to ask about the investments institutions will (or will not) make in there libraries. Dan going to take the university and college is the unit of analysis – because they are the vehicles through which investment flows into the acadeic library and potentially into shared library services.

“The challenge for library funding is that it comes from the same revenue stream as funds the core teaching units” (think I got that right). A decision to fund the library is a decision not to fund an academic/teaching post.

Dan says you can always find 10-15% cuts in HE – but 20-25% means fundamental transformation. Dan not going to focus this morning on what can be done, but what should be done.

From 1980-2000 there was a phenomenal growth in student numbers in the UK – and thus a drop in the cost per student – make savings through efficiencies of scale. This in actuality means improved participation rate but a deteriorating student to faculty ration.

Libraries have benefited from budget increases, but spend per student drops – as has the library budget as a proportion of the overall institution budget – that is we are getting a smaller slice of a larger cake. At the same time there have been huge increases in the cost of material – 51% increases in journal subs (2001-2006) and similar (if slightly lower) increases in mongraph costs.

Alongside this cost of materials, libraries have been investing in new services and materials – digitisation, supporting innovative research, dealing with Open Educational materials etc. etc.

Dan says we’ve seen library staff more embedded into academic departments in some areas – not sure how far UK and US practice differs here? Except in medicine in the UK I’m not so aware of this type of embedding, and would say my experience is that subject librarians have struggled to keep up the level of engagement they previously had either due to decreased resource, or changing idea of role (focus on information literacy etc. as opposed to direct engagement with research?)

So – real strategies being considered at UC (University of California):
Collection Management
There is a lot of multiple redundancy in library collections (e.g. based on OCLC analysis). At the same time since the 1940s there has been an explosion in book production. The market is doing mass digitization of the legacy of print materials. Current and in-print material increasingly being made available as e-books.

Dan says: “Redundant management of print materials is insane”

Why do we keep doing this – we invest huge amounts (once you factor in the cost of acquisition, and the cost of storing the material) in maintaining our print monograph collections, most of which suffer from multiple redundancy.

Dan suggests: “Let’s aim to collect the unique generally and the general uniquely” (is there any evidence that reduction in investment in the general collections would result in a move or investment to special collections?)

What would it take to stop this?

• Secure management of digital copies
• National repositories for the print ‘copy of record’
• Localized print on demand and download to the handheld

Dan says – we know how to do this. So why aren’t we?
(I’d question whether we can know if this is going to save money – has going electronic with our journal collections saved us money?)

Could be optimize scarce library funding by:

• supporting next-generation collections with the same institutionally based fund source that are currently deveoted to traditional library acqusitions (‘traditional’ can encompass print and digital)
• Would this force a more realistic approach to prioritization and budget trade-off

“No money should be spent on Open Access that doesn’t come out of the library materials budget”

Could this type of strategy result in the development of an institutionally-responseive suite of national digital library services?

• Consortial licensing that creates ‘collections’ that are profiled to suit institutions with different academic profiles and information needs
• Discovery to delivery services that orient towrads the individual (inclusing the coordinated cataloging and technical services, and electronic records maangement strategies that that entails)
• A national institutional repository strategy implemented at the departmental or individual not instituional level

Dan argues that the ‘institutional’ layer for repositories doesn’t make sense – as a consumer he isn’t interested in the output of a specific institution – I agree, but there is a question of how funding works – it may be the institution has an interest in creating institutional collections?

Dan recognises that all this would require huge effort – but argues that it would “leverage exceptional (world-class) nationa infrastructure and distributed library resources in order to:

• eliminate redundant effort
• save cost without encroaching on service
• and if done properly, return real value to universities and college whose investment would be at once essential to sustain and focus the effort

Dan mentions Deepdyve as an example of micropayments for academic material. If we (libraries) don’t change the market will do it to us. For me this is the crux of it – if this is the case – what is the justification for libraries? I’m not sure Dan has said why we need libraries in this scenario? What is our value proposition in a scenario where collection management is done by the individual choosing items for their own collections? To compare to the move in the music industry away from albums to individual tracks – while we can regret the passing of the ‘album’ in music meaning that there is a tendency to converge on the most commercial individual tracks – and expect that the range of music we listen to becomes more limited as a result – but do we know how to stop this?

Dan goes on to argue that if we make the moves he is suggesting it potentially frees up local resource to support students and faculty where they need it.

The key challenges Dan sees are:

• Communicating the benefits
• Leadership problem – kick starting an economy for shared service will require intervention at the VC level, and it is very difficult to get their attention. Need to be careful to get the right message – you get attention by talking savings, but this is not the point – we have opportunity to transform and this is what we should be doing
• 1st mover problem  – who makes the first move? This can’t work unless we do it at an appropriate scale across several (many?) institutions
• Scope creep – driven by the possibilities in the online information and the needs of the few
• Threat to local autonomy
• Threat to the local academic library and academic librarian

“The library will become a broker” – Dan is convinced this is what will happen no matter what.

If you are look at a permanent budge reductions of 25% +, then an ‘orderly retreat’ beasts a disorderly one.

In a networked digital age and a transformed globale economy the academic library will be fundamentally changed…

Q & A:

Q: (David?) Just a comment – changing economic model – i.e. lift of student fee cap – will have huge impact. Believes (as an ex-VC) there is a chance to take action and a ‘segment’ level (probably not national level)

Q:(David Prosser, RLUK) UK Research Reserve focuses on deduplication in journals – need to look at this for monographs. There are problems in moving investment from core collection budget to Open Access costs – Open Access needs larger initial investment than perhaps can be funded.

A: We can’t support two models of scholarly communication at once – institutions need to face up to this and take the issues raised by OA more seriously. We (libraries/universities) are

Q: (me ) question about what the value proposition of libraries is in a disaggregated, disintermediate world Dan describes

A: Basically – there is going to be a huge need for people with information skills – whether they end up being organised as a ‘library’ is another question – and may depend on local politics and policies

Dan says – some of this stuff is things that a small group of people have been talking about and saying we should do for a long time. Now a much larger set of people are interested.