Finding Your Voice: How Collection Management Departments in Academic Libraries Contribute to Openness in Higher Education
Introduction
In between writing OKHE1 and this post, I changed roles, moving from long-term employment in Inter-Library Loans (ILL) to my fourth week in Stock Operations, both of which fall under the umbrella heading of Collection Strategies at the University of Manchester (UoM) Library. Whilst this was a welcome and exciting adjustment, it also brought with it a sense of displacement — I had gone from a place of familiarity and understanding to a new landscape, one still shifting according to fluctuations in the Covid-19 pandemic. My administrative skills may have been transferable, but recognition of how the new role intersected with Open Knowledge required fresh thinking.
It was heartening to read OKHE1 posts from Simon Abbott and Rebecca Riley, both of whom spoke of uncertainty positioning their roles within an Open Knowledge framework. I was also mindful of Catherine Cronin’s recording from session one, where she discusses how becoming open is an ever changing procedure, a goal to be worked towards. This concept of continuously discovering new definitions and methods of openness resonated simultaneously with the “yellow brick road” of my career, and also with the theory of reflective practice used within the Local Academic Culture of Higher Education (LACHE) module. Both acknowledge the path is rarely smooth, and encourage re-evaluation of knowledge.
In OKHE1, I spoke of how developments within ILL helped to remove barriers to openness for the team, who still receive a steady turnover of requests during the pandemic. However, when interviewing colleagues as part of the assessment for LACHE, their responses revealed concern that their work was not valued due to a perceived lack of visibility. This unease reminded me a comment on behalf of collective metadata (also known as cataloguing) departments, uncovered during my research on the Cataloging Code of Ethics, on which I based my assignment for Internationalisation in Higher Education. Whilst the code itself was a move towards more open practice, enabling better representation of diversity, and providing tools to help develop projects such as collection decolonisation, metadata practitioners still felt that theirs was “hidden work.”¹
It was this sense of being hidden that struck me, whilst reading posts from both OKHE1 and OKHE2, as the antithesis of what OKHE was about. Whilst other library departments were represented by teams such as Research Services and Teaching, Learning and Students, Collection Strategies (or Collection Management (CM) as it is known more widely), and its concerns and practices, whilst referred to in certain posts, (Phil Reed discusses decolonisation, but not specifically from a CM standpoint), was largely absent. OKHE2 then, is a double opportunity, primarily a starting point to identify different aspects of my department that contribute to openness in HE, and in so doing, establish their voice as part of the open knowledge conversation.
What is Collection Management?
For the purpose of this post, I am using the term to define a department within an academic library, comprising a group of teams (the majority of which are not customer facing), that can include metadata, book and journal acquisitions, ILL, collection development and stock management. Larger, more progressive libraries may also have a dedicated reading list unit, but at present this is still innovative — within the N8 Research Partnership only the Universities of Manchester and Newcastle have such. Collection Management (CM) may also be referred to as Collection Strategies, Library Services or Collection Resources, however each grouping has a similar purpose — to support taught and postgraduate students, and academic staff in their use of the physical and digital resources provided by their university library.
“It’s incredible what you can do with the right support.” April McMahon, session 2, Open Teaching and Learning.
How does Collection Management aid openness in HE? Obvious areas
Arguably, the most obviously open practice of CM is created by metadata teams, in that they are responsible for compiling and maintaining entries in digital library catalogues. Originally developed in the 1960s, Online Public Access Catalogues (OPAC) were one of the earliest digital open knowledge resources. More recently, their contents, have been uploaded into union catalogues, such as Jisc Library Hub Discover, which concentrates largely on the holdings of UK universities. Together with advancements in cataloguing systems, such as Resource Delivery and Access (RDA), which connects related material (the work itself, its expressions, manifestations and individual items), these resources advance searching and accessibility throughout the HE sector. Additionally, as more CM metadata departments experiment with Linked Data (which updates all related records when information is added to an RDA entry), and Linked Open Data, the ILL process will also be expedited, as prospective lending partners are more easily identifiable via automated systems such as Rapid ILL. This is also a nod in the right direction towards curtailing university information privilege, as defined by Char Booth, giving the general public, (including communities identified during the OKHE session on open research as marginal, such as charities, as well as public libraries, insight into the unique holdings of higher education libraries (and vice-versa).
As mentioned in OKHE1, working alongside Open Access (OA) resources, ILL is still a relevant service, and with the advent of new systems that perform fast searches of international OPACs, one that can help circumvent costly paywalls, a recognised barrier to open knowledge. Different academic libraries subscribe to various different publisher packages, meaning that there are numerous potential suppliers, should a home institution not have full access. Newer systems are also designed to eliminate handling charges that are passed to readers, the ethics of which is the subject of a long-standing debate in HE, a strong component of which is that the lending library, whilst enabling wider access, does support a core population, who contribute to its budget. This argument is pertinent with the raising of student fees in both 2009 and 2012 coupled with a UK-wide student complaint during the Covid-19 pandemic — lack of value for money. Moreover, waiving charges coupled with increased delivery speed present a viable (and legal) alternative to sites such as Sci-Hub.
Less Obvious Areas
It is also the work of CM departments to process and maintain Open Educational Resources (OER) to support both teaching and research. At UoM, the provision of digital core textbooks to first year undergraduates is a collaborative project between the Reading List, Acquisitions and Metadata teams, as a direct response to comments from the National Student Survey that expressed frustration over the lack of availability of hard copy texts on the open shelves. Whilst this particular project is limited to larger institutions, especially those in the Global North, CM teams sector wide are also responsible for managing the activation of e-books and journals, (making the metadata record and link in the library catalogue live and open to discovery). Although this a more widespread procedure, it is not always straightforward. Even items purchased as ‘shelf-ready’, or, indeed, OA, need processing and maintenance. Often, the catalogue records created by suppliers are lacking in the detailed information that supports successful discovery, or are created on a computer system that does not communicate effectively with those used within separate and diverse universities. These problems have to be addressed “to provide enhanced access to the widest variety of relevant resources,” a crucial factor in progression in university rankings.
The curation of OERs by CM is partially responsible for the swift and successful move to off-campus teaching during the pandemic, leading a member of the UoM Library Student Group to comment, during session 3 of OKHE, that they had no need to be in the library building. However, CM staff have also been decisive in keeping academic libraries open physically throughout Covid-19, recognising changes in the HE landscape, as Masud Khokhar notes, students now use library spaces as “a stimulating and comfortable 24/7 environment for study,” as well as a place of social support, rather than to simply browse physical stock. Part of their remit is also the organisation and relocation of hard copy stock to free up space, so it is essential that the most relevant titles are in place according to need — in a nutshell, the right books in the right place at the right time. Despite fundamental changes in borrowing, shelving teams (usually part of Collection Development or Stock Management), are still responsible for keeping physical collections open, quarantining and re-shelving books, as well as retrieving them from offsite stores in a bid to minimise the disruption to researchers.
As well as supporting teaching in the process described above, CM departments can also work to promote research in HE. At UoM, there is close collaboration between the Metadata and Research Services teams in maintaining the university’s Current Research Information System (CRIS), Pure. Metadata check bibliographic information that has been uploaded into Pure to ensure that it is accurate, and amend any errors, which enables staff and research students to raise the visibility of their internal research profile. This can also be linked to an ORCID id, so the information is not just limited to UoM, but becomes part of a larger, open network, that of a global research community. Other Metadata responsibilities include checking whether or not outputs are OA, identifying their Creative Commons Licenses, and setting parameters to establish whether or not the output is eligible to be included in the university’s submission to the Research Excellence Framework. If so, the OA output, be it a book, chapter or article can then be uploaded. The work of the team is also a first step towards addressing the ‘reproducibility crisis’ explored by Jess Napthine-Hodgkinson, as the management and validation of datasets within Pure, is also within their workload.
Room for Improvement? Closed Areas
As previous paragraphs have established, CM departments are involved in a series of collaborative processes that facilitate openness in HE, and this is also the case when it comes to updating materials. As hard-copy textbooks are superseded, reading list or purchasing teams order the new editions. These then go to metadata for bibliographic checking, a process distinct from e-book activation, but one subject to the same bibliographic data issues.
Superseded items, however, bring us to perhaps the most closed, or least discussed area of CM, the weeding and disposal of stock. As noted by a colleague, these practices a theme at the Collection Management: Share the Experience conference as being part of a scrupulous and well-organised library. Weeding and de-duplication (the practices of removing outdated, little used or duplicate books from the shelf and catalogue) are necessary and carefully controlled procedures. They also relate to earlier points in that there is a only a finite amount of space within library buildings and stores, that outdated knowledge cannot be described as open, and that ultimately, in a HE society dominated by metrics, such as the NSS, universities have a responsibility to all stakeholders to maintain up-to-date information. Outdated or multiple copy items that are not well used are selected to be sold off to booksellers, whilst items in poor condition are withdrawn for recycling. Weeding of OA material can also fall under the department’s remit too (usually a metadata responsibility) — as temporary electronic resources provided during the pandemic prove, open does always equate to permanent, and is subject to the same process of becoming out of date as print stock. Whilst questions around weeding and disposal are the elephant in the room, this is one area where, I feel, as long the procedures are carried out ethically, and can be justified, that may be acceptable to remain between institutions. As Louise Drumm commented in session one of OKHE, not everything needs to be open.
“The customers don’t want to see the mops and brushes.” Employer at my first Saturday job.
The Way Ahead: How can CM Departments become more open?
As Padma notes in OKHE1, libraries have “always been a caring, sharing community.” Throughout this post, I hope to have conveyed that most of the procedures that CM departments undertake are inherently collaborative, whether worked internally or as part of the wider HE environment. Collaboration is an area that Jeremy Atkinson feels is now “no longer an option but a necessity” for CM, due to the changes in the student expectations, developments in technology, OA resources, and budget cuts mentioned previously. Whilst it is arguable that both working with physical stock and in ‘back office’ locations have helped contribute to the ‘hidden’ aspect of CM, Atkinson offers a counter-argument, that digital resources can also render academic library resources and support as invisible, as students and researchers consider themselves “self-sufficient in information skills.”
In light of these considerations, it is little wonder that libraries such as UoM are concentrating on larger-scale collaborative projects as part of their strategic commitments. Again, however, this is nothing new for CM departments, with acquisitions and reading list departments (when available) having participated in bids with RLUK and also, more importantly, smaller regional consortia to help drive down publisher costs, described by Rachel Kenyon as a “massive barrier” to smaller universities.
CM has also been instrumental in the UKRR initiative, a joint undertaking established by the British Library for academic libraries to simultaneously de-duplicate holdings and release shelf space in storage areas. (The initiative also extends to e-journals as changes in purchasing habits shift according to demand.) Advances in technology will permit this to be done in a more open way, with evaluation tools such as GreenGlass, allowing institutions with departmental multi-site libraries to streamline their collections (measure and remove duplicate or outdated copies), and view their own data as a part of the entire collective. Not only will this facilitate benchmarking against competitor libraries, it will also generate data to help identify areas for increased purchasing, allowing libraries to purchase new stock to represent their increasingly diverse stakeholders, and simultaneously establish where decolonisation of existing holdings can take place.
Whilst it is important to recognise that the cost of systems such as these may be prohibitive to smaller public institutions, they are at least a starting point for uncovering collections that may have been underused or forgotten. In turn, collaboration, can engender appreciation between peer HE institutions, whether this is of the holdings themselves, or more hopefully, best practice in care and management. This is also the case with making CM conference presentations openly available after the event. To open the conversation beyond HE, it would be useful to use social media accounts — using appropriate hashtags on Twitter to convey highlights of work in progress, or, as Jane G discusses, a blog, written in accessible, rather than academic language.
As a final point, one thing that the PGCHE has taught me, throughout all modules, is that there are very rarely straightforward solutions to the questions or difficulties that arise as part of day-to-day practices (information privilege, paywalls), other than to acknowledge my own privileged position, and challenge it whenever I can. As Sam Aston reflects, what you think is the journey, is really “just the start of the journey.” In this respect, I feel more confident about my own path into Open Knowledge, my new role, and of applying what I have learned to illuminate the value of CM work in a HE setting.
[1]: Shoemaker, Elizabeth. “No One Can Whistle a Symphony: Seeking a Catalogers’ Code of Ethics.” Knowledge Organization : KO 42(5) 2015, p. 357.
