This is my colleague, James Kay. My name is Paul Kaminer.
We'd just like to thank Michael for inviting us. It's very kind of him, and we're very pleased to be here.
And we're going to talk around several different topics.
But the main thing we're focusing on is evidence based decision making for collection management.
Okay. So before we get into the detail of the presentation,
I would just like to give you a little introduction to both of us first and a bit of context from the university perspective.
So starting with myself, I'm James Kay.
I'm the library subscriptions and document delivery librarian and I started at Dolby in December 2013,
previously working as a company librarian for a private enterprise company specialising in pharma tech.
And I have a little anecdote, which is that I met former Doctor Who, Tom Baker, and got his autograph at Songs of Praise.
Superb. Yes. Okay. My name is Paul Cabinet.
I have the very long title of Library Resources, Development and Delivery Manager.
Effectively, I am the acquisitions librarian. Previously I was at a university in Leicester where I moved over to acquisitions
and before that I was a subject librarian at the University of Nottingham.
My claim to fame again,
keeping up the BBC doctors and sort of cultural touchstones is that I appeared as a librarian in an episode of popular daytime TV soap doctors.
Okay. So enough about us. A bit more context for you.
So what we've been doing here at the University of Derby is looking at a long term strategy for our subscriptions and our resources,
and that's to ensure sustainable service development.
And we've also looked to the process review and analysis of service provision,
and that's resulted in various changes to some of the roles and responsibilities that we have in the resources team at Derby.
And that's also coincided with a reorganisation across the whole of university and particularly the academic structure.
So what we've got first then James is predecessor.
The wonderful Sally Rimmer provided us with this quote, and you'll find them peppered throughout our presentation.
When working with resources, a vast bank of goodwill is required, and we have found that almost every single day.
The first thing that I think we can talk about is budgets.
And what we found is that, as with almost any institution,
we're and increasing pressure to justify what we spend money on, how we spend it, and to sort of like get the best value.
And in doing that, we've worked with our colleagues in subject services on refocusing that.
So not only did we want to look at the budget spend, but we wanted to look at the teaching learning research needs.
And we wanted something that we could take back to the wider university that we could say was transparent.
So they could clearly see how we were spending something that was measurable.
So we had sort of a benchmarking and some it was comparable.
The second focus is more about systems.
So thinking about the compatibility of the resources we already have and with our existing systems and technology,
and for us specifically at Derby, that's within our reading list.
So tell us, Inspire, tell us by digitised content that's focusing on our discovery service for website go and also our library catalogue present.
And we've also looked at pricing models, collections and subscription packages and also specifically licenses as well.
So that's checking licenses, storage and management.
Okay. And the final challenge I think we found has been access.
So again, it's how we meet those access in terms of licensing requirements, looking at authentication,
authentication standards, ensuring that users her eligible have access to our resources and users who don't can't.
And also, we have a lot of off campus students and obviously we want to make things as straightforward as we possibly can.
And the final project that we've been undertaking, which ties in with some of the things you've already had today,
is is the accuracy and visibility of our holdings.
So by that we mean are monographs, seminars, aerials.
We are looking now to exploit our collections and to better kind of promote and improve the metadata.
And we'll leave that hanging. Obviously, if you have any questions, then please do ask as you go along.
But hopefully some of these things are familiar to you. So what's then been the response specifically at Dalby and from the EA Resources team?
Free areas in particular, we'd like to share with you, first of all, working groups and we've got three particular examples.
So we created the collection development group and here the focus is on collections in the whole raft and individually.
So we look at reviewing and making more effective decisions through actual evidence.
Secondly, a library systems improvement group.
So from the name more of a focus on systems here and particularly accessibility finds ability usability.
Thirdly more specifically here for reading list. So this focuses on collaboration and reading list provision.
And what this coincided with was a review of the roles and responsibilities within the team.
At some point I realised that James would need a holiday.
I couldn't simply go, James, keep on working. It would be cruel, it would be cruel, it would be illegal as well.
And and we realised that actually in terms of what we wanted to deliver, it couldn't be done.
So what we then looked at was the roles in terms of James's role.
So he subscriptions and document delivery. We have an EA Resources Library assistant who when we initially started was still photocopying indexes.
We quickly moved on from there and has now taken on much more responsibility for sort of day to day subscriptions.
Management has expanded into answering queries which we receive from our colleagues in the Enquiry
Service and has also taken on some of the more sort of day to day challenges that we face.
Things working of liaising with publishers. And finally, we have a e-business administrator who is our colleague, Tim Peacock.
And in addition to the many things he deals with, such as interlibrary loans and ethos and various of the parts to do with our repository,
he also has some responsibilities with James, and as I say,
when I realised that James needed a holiday, we started to look at building some support processes.
It also helped us to look at gaps in service provision and crucially,
it helps us to clarify roles and responsibilities with our colleagues in I.T. It helps us to clarify roles within the library.
So with James coming, there was assumptions that James was taking on the same work exactly as his predecessor,
which wasn't the case, and also with publishers.
So getting to know them and building up some relationships with them. And finally, we wanted to look to unify our systems where possible.
So we look to have reading this software that was in line with our digitised content software to provide a more sort of universal,
straightforward process. And thirdly, monitoring through the top.
You'll see resources at Dolby AC Talk UK and that mailbox is exclusively for logging systems,
queries for faults and is now the default mail address for our subscription.
So all of us have liaison with invoices, renewal information is all dealt free with our team email box.
So if one of us is on holiday, someone else can take the case.
So we focus more on the monitoring side of renewals and purchase order notices as well.
And we've established regular meetings with our colleagues in university finance.
So looking at quarterly meetings where we can review budgets and spend,
we've also started to establish cancellation periods across resources and tying into the work that Tim has done in terms of usage,
we started to review the current provision of usage statistics, so that includes things such as peer and institutional benchmarking across time.
Okay. This is a quote from Tim. Tim is a my team all of my seem a practical quote machines on a daily basis.
There is a quote for all occasions, but in this case, all usage is valid.
And this has been one of the key things that's really helped us to communicate
this idea of usage and how we actually use that to to assess our holdings.
So one of the things we found was that actually there wasn't a lot of knowledge
about usage and there was quite a lot of misunderstandings about what it could do.
And what we were able to do with it.
So one of the common common queries we had, for example, was how can I tell if my group of students in Malaysia, for example,
are using this resource, but also the business students are using it and shouldn't they be paying more for that?
And how do we do this? How do we work out the money side of things? How can I take this back to my academics and talk to them about it?
And we had to say, we're not GCU, we don't have that kind of monitoring powers.
And this sort of conversation was very helpful because it helps us to realise some of the misconceptions we've had.
It helps us to think about how we were actually going to communicate with our
colleagues who are in subject teams and who are also in the library management teams,
and how then they would communicate that to academics and the university management.
And I think just to sort of give you an idea as well, there is also the problem,
the actual sheer problem of just collating and putting all of that data together and rationalising that in a way in which people can understand.
And just the sheer practicality of usage consolidation, especially with very limited members of staff within our team,
has been a huge task and it helps that we establish some benchmarks.
And as I say, their cost per use has been the primary indicator. But we'll talk about how that again is within context.
So moving from what is his age to actually now linking that to cost.
So a lot of questions here. We go back to assessing our systems and our provision and we ask that very simple questions here.
Well, what has the university agreed to provide to its students, to its staff, to its users?
Often what actually can it not provide, and that might be for a specific student group, can only access certain resources, perhaps.
And if a group can't. And in terms of licences, again, how do we check those?
How do we manage those? What do we do with storage?
Taking that down to pricing models and our collections and our subscription packages.
And again, we're asking the questions here. What has the university actually purchased?
What content does it own? And the question that suppliers like to ask us.
When is the money due? If anyone can think of a better picture, by the way, for linking users to costs, I'm very happy to take that on.
It is because it's actually my watch, and it is because it is a beautiful, precision built machine that is required to do all of this.
It's a very tenuous link, but we've done our best. We've done our best.
And that leads us to how we actually monitor that information and again, how we translate that.
The usage workbook doesn't cover all resources, so we have to be very clear about what it does and what it doesn't cover,
and it's not immediately accessible and will show you versions of this.
Where on the version. Oh ten 1112 I can begin to guess how many versions we've gone through now.
And what we also found was that the emphasis on numbers was leading to an oversimplification.
We've had to kind of say, for example, focus on collating anything that was council compliant.
So, for example, your job on your journal counts, which is standard usage indicator and your sort of DVRs,
your databases as well and just translates people.
Again, we can't get everything we are collating noncancer usage,
but at the moment with the staffing and resources we have, it has gone into the deep freeze.
It is simply just being collated and at some point in the future we hope to bring that back out and actually have some comparison across time.
That also comes back to the user education, just the different types of usage.
How we actually analyse that. So cost per use and cost per download.
And the key thing which we have stressed to both our subject colleagues and they've been very receptive to this and also to the academics,
is that usage is not in isolation. By no means we saying that it's the be all and end all of how you should make decisions.
It is one of many factors and we have very much emphasised the need for the teaching, learning and research needs.
So now we're going to show you our response in terms first of all, in terms of a spreadsheets.
So it be scared. It is a match. You're going to see a magnificent piece of work.
And my hat's off to James for doing this. Sadly, this frozen pitch does not compare to the magnificence of the actual thing in the flash.
But let me explain. So I work with two spreadsheets on a monthly basis, one for our resources,
our databases, and the second for our journals is to screenshot what you see here.
We held individual meetings with our subject colleagues because we were realising it was
apparent that the spreadsheet that we send out to them in all its glory is raw for complex.
And that's true. And we asked for feedback and suggestions and things they'd like to see.
So in this screenshot here, if you look, you can see at the very top you will see some comments.
And this is for simplification to say what columns and things mean.
So for example, the one that we've highlighted here is for the suppliers.
So you can use the filters to select by a particular supplier.
You can also do this across all of the columns.
So you can select your specific phone code and you can find out whether you were allowed to cancel in a particular package.
You can find out if the particular subscription is a main renewal or transition or a midterm.
You can see if it's in print, electronic or both.
We've also got a lot of colour coding in here and become colour coding like that.
So if you want to find out a particular subscription deal, for example, at the bottom there's a big row in Green, for example, for Elsevier.
We've also got different colour things here for packages as well.
If you want to find out for a particular title, they say cancelled.
We've got the greyed out fields or a title at CC, which is the blue.
And we, like many of the universities during this year, have been affected by the collapse of sweats.
And that has been something we're not the so you can share our sort of frustration and here is the one I think,
and this is something that we've had to highlight in the journal spreadsheet this year is,
first of all, our original fields for our sweats titles and where to moved to.
So you see rows in red and rows in blue for transition titles.
And that's been an enormous task that Natalie and I have worked on to get that right through the year,
to make sure that everything is reflected and that everything adds up.
So the idea and the emphasis of this spreadsheet is to make things simple and clear, not just for our colleagues, but also for myself as well.
I can't stress how much work has been done, and I'm sure you found the same because of the collapse of sweats, huge, huge amounts of work.
And again, explaining that colleagues and explaining what had already been paid for and how the money had been split was a huge,
huge amount of work and we realised that we would have to sort of work with
our colleagues to explain this and also to see where the money being spent.
The second part of this is the most recent version of our databases.
And I think I I'll point out a couple of things here.
Previously, we were doing things like comparisons with interlibrary loans.
So would it be cheaper to buy an enslaved loan per title for for an article level?
And actually, we found that wasn't very helpful. It was interesting indicator, but really what it came back to was cost per use.
We have things like indicators in terms of usage increase or decrease across previous year.
We have just the basic counts which again accounts compliance.
We also have a usage range and that is taken from a project which Tim participated in
with colleagues at I believe it's Manchester and Glasgow and Dalby took part in that.
Now that is actually a fairly old indicator.
Now I don't have the numbers, but I'll be happy to look them up.
And it was undertaken probably. Probably at least seven or eight years ago.
And I think those indicators now are just very off in terms of the actual usage.
You'll be seeing fewer resources.
And I think it would be very useful to kind of have a have some sort of update, and that's something that we'll be taking forward in future.
But again, it's just straightforward things that we can show and share with our colleagues, and then they again can translate that to our academics.
And of course, they're under pressure to save money, just as the library is.
They're under pressure to justify what they spend their budgets on. I'm really it is about giving them this comprehensive picture.
That's right.
The emphasis is very much on both of these spreadsheets to give the best possible information, because ultimately we don't make those decisions.
That's the decisions for our colleagues to make, but we assist them in that process.
And this is a way of doing that. So now we focus on the more implicit challenges at the university.
So we're thinking about how we actually think and understand and what we're communicating.
And the first section of that is awareness.
So we look at identifying our resource needs, and we focus very much on proofing, future proofing.
So we're focusing on resource planning, and very much that's in the early stages, of course, development and a lot of liaison.
So from our perspective, from our team, it's liaison with our colleagues in the academic services team.
And then as Paul said, that then further liaison from our subject librarians with our academics and we across all levels of university.
We've got obviously to understand the various issues,
but there's a particular focus here at senior management level to understand a lot of the complexities,
and particularly for things such as tender agreements and big deals.
Okay. As always, communication.
You could expect that we have spent a lot of time managing the expectations.
There is obviously the expectation that you can access anything at any time, anywhere, regardless what it is.
We have. Had a lot of work with our publishers, so we've done quite a lot of work with ASCO, for example,
in terms of looking at how we can improve our systems and make things more accessible again.
You know, our colleagues, our colleagues in the library to, to, to convince and sort of help them to make these decisions.
And we found that that generally there is. It's almost it's almost like a black art resource for news is like a black art.
It's sort of almost hidden. And what we're trying to do is to bring it out into the light and make it more apparent.
And the key part has been communicating this information to colleagues.
As James said, when we were sending or sending out these magnificent spreadsheets that we'd spent a lot of time on.
And nobody understood them. And we thought, why is this?
How can this be? Look at the amount of work we put in. And what we realised is that again, it's that context.
And we actually found the best way of explaining all of this to our colleagues
was to have one to once we would spend roughly sort of 45 minutes to an hour,
literally just going through how the spreadsheet worked,
their subscriptions in terms of a bit of history and a bit of context, the usage we pulled everything in.
And after that they said, actually, you know, you know, because these are very intelligent people.
They've been working with US subscriptions for a long time and we realised that in fact the way we were communicating,
the way we were trying to get that message across just simply wasn't working.
And we found that actually the ones who on approach was by far the most successful and it was the one that made our colleagues feel valued.
They had really, really good ideas about how we can improve things and what they'd like to see and their
problems in communicating that back to their academics and how the academics communicate that.
It's been a real education for us as well.
And I had to put my hands up and say, I see, let's start again.
And that takes us into focus on the organisation and the sector.
So there are challenges of culture and structural challenges within the institution that we have to think about,
as Paul has explained in terms of perhaps how we communicate and from our team
and then how that's communicated through the chain ultimately to the academics.
We can't ignore the priorities within the institution itself and that might be things such as students experience,
it might be the focus on particular areas of research.
We also have to take into account factors that are external.
So we think about funding, we think about recruitment, we think about student numbers, and we can't ignore legislation.
So we have to consider copyright restrictions, for example.
And I'm sure you're all aware cost because resources are increasingly costing more, whether that's journals, databases, etc.
So we have to think of all these different factors and take that into account.
I think the copyright restrictions have been very interesting.
We recently acquired the Atlas by Digitised Content Module and we now have a copyright
clearance which is working through adding lots of individual articles to reading lists.
And it's almost how.
It almost is pointing the way forward to how subscription models will go.
And I would like to see subscriptions models change to an almost content level in almost article level content.
It's almost like a precursor for that, and I think that would be one of the big things that changes in future.
So. Some of the interesting things that we decided to do.
One was usability testing.
I don't know how your website is or how much involvement you have or how much involvement you have in setting up your systems.
We recently had a group of students and they generously agreed to come and test some of our systems.
We found actually they were quite sophisticated in their searching, but.
We tend to look at it as librarians and we're very I wouldn't say old school.
Is that fair? It's probably fair. And actually, students aren't interested so much in in strategy.
There is a big role for education and that is something that our colleagues in the subject team are doing.
But actually we want to make our systems as user friendly and simple to use as possible.
So instant access to full text. So with advanced search options,
those are the kind of things that should be obvious and yet actually can be quite hard to put into place when looking at how we spend
across time and how we can maximise and ensure that our colleagues are spending their budgets and therefore the library is not,
you know, is always seen to be and shown to be good value for money, events like this, shared practice and community.
The only the only regret I have is that I'm not able to attend the other events which are happening right now.
There have been some superb speakers and and both James and I, we really like to have gone to that.
So these kind of events are always excellent. And as I say, we found that it has had really positive impacts in other areas.
So as librarians feel more confident, you know, they know exactly what they're talking about.
They can go back to this evidence based approach. The inquiry service referrals are much, much more straightforward.
And we're getting these resources inquiry straight away and they can be dealt with by either James or Tim or Nassir or occasionally myself.
From my point of view,
it's been brilliant for advocacy of my team and talking about the good work that they do and and their roles and responsibilities.
And it's also enabled me to take on new tools, a new system.
So the digitised content, you know, we made a case for that and was very successful.
And finally, as James says, it builds in a degree of future proofing.
Being involved with academic foundations, being involved in course planning,
having librarians embedded within that, as has been a sort of key aspect to just.
Help to think about resourcing and adequately resourcing, you know, the teaching, learning and research needs.
So also going forward, we focus more on sort of analysis here.
So we look at developing an agreed assessment criteria for all our renewals, whether that's a database or a journal subscription or something else.
And we're basing this on our teaching on learning or research needs.
We're looking at usage and we're analysing our sort of comparison data.
We're looking at cost analysis and we're looking at accessibility and authentication.
And if you take the example of a journal, the criteria might be many different things.
So it might have a wonderful impact factor and your academics might publish regularly in it, and your students have recommended it to you to purchase.
It's been selected by a particular lecturer on the reading list for a specific module,
and it may simply be the only journal in the field and there is an absolute impetus to have it within the collection.
So what we're saying here is that there are many, many different factors and criteria to take into account,
which is that that is the that is the House which has been purchased,
in fact, the University of Derby for the Forensic Sciences course,
whereupon they re-enact gruesome murder scenes and various the blood spatter techniques.
So we thought we would include that.
This is the James and I talks about various things sort of wish list of things that we would like to see happening.
And as it stays there, the ultimate aim, the dream of EU resources, something that holds our supply details,
something that holds our renewal dates and our costs and our licensing information.
Something that can reconcile the usage and provide analytics across time so we can
benchmark with something that links with student information and student numbers.
And of course, something which,
as I'm sure you've all dealt with various library systems at various points and making them talk to each other is not easy.
Something that allows the authentication, something that enables the systems to talk to each other.
Something which you can update on a universal basis.
This is a major extreme, and we have been assured by publishers that this is here for various things.
I will not name them. But I think realistically, with 3 to 5 years away before you get probably two thirds of that and probably some of the.
Some of it may never happen. But it is a beautiful dream, ladies and gentlemen.
And this is. This is what we. This is what we hope to unify.
This is what we hope to to sort of achieve. And until that points we are left with.
Excel sheets. We're left with reconciling that information.
We're left with data trawling. We're left with manipulating data and trying to present that to our colleagues.
Okay. We've put contact details at the very end of this slide and we are obviously sharing the slides with you as well.
So you'll see contact details for myself, for Paul and also for Tim.
So if you specifically have any questions regarding usage terms, human and and with a bit of surface promotion,
there is a Twitter feed and a Web address if you'd like to have a look at information about the university.
So all we can say is, thank you very much. Thank you once again for the invitation for having us here.
And most most importantly, love your library. Gentlemen, love your library.
Thank you.