It's a real privilege to be here, and I'm so glad to have been invited.
I love coming to Oxford. Love coming to the body every time.
And of course, since Oxford contains the best museum in the world.
I'm referring, of course, to Pitt Rivers. It's always worth coming from from that point of view.
I must say, I feel in this wonderful auditorium, in a mass institute,
that I might any moment be expected to solve the riddle of Fermat's Last Theorem, or whatever the successive paradoxes.
Well, thank you for the invitation. It's hardly sensible of the.
Oh, oh, I know I ought to have when I. Slides up.
I'm not sure how I do this. Perhaps somebody can help me.
Anyway, it's hardly sensible of the organisers, as Richard hinted,
to invite somebody who's been out of libraries for over two years and been out of working full time in university libraries for a whole 17 years.
However, I am going to talk about the future of research libraries and as far as I can.
I'm going to talk particularly about collections and the future of collections, and thank you so much.
During the talk, you might expect to see a lot of words and bullet points and diagrams, and I thought I'd spare you all that.
So you're going to see some lovely pictures of the South and Central Wales coast.
I apologise to those of you from North Wales. Because I've still got 400 miles to walk.
However, you can concentrate on what you're going to see instead of what you're going to hear.
If you don't like it. Now, two scenes from from the life of a young librarian.
And to begin with, I beg your indulgence.
If I if I do some harmless reminiscing for a while trying to imagine you're in
the newly opened Arts and Social Studies library in University College Cardiff.
The date is the 15th of September 1975.
I'm an assistant librarian. It's my first day, my first professional post.
I'm sitting at a trestle table because it's a new building and the permanent furniture has not turned up yet.
With a colleague also. His first day. My sole job is to catalogue books.
New books. What we do is we take a slip of paper.
Here is one. It's a very accurate copy of what we used to do.
Take a slip of paper and write down with a biro the description of the book.
Check it against standard forms of names.
And Library of Congress classification numbers. And then send your slip off for checking by the person next door.
Gradually, our desks moved apart.
Then the slip would go off to the typist who had a room to herself because the machine that she wrote or needed a room to itself.
That was a tape typewriter. Does anybody remember tape typewriters?
Yeah, a few people. It was a huge contraption that could reproduce an original card, any number of duplicate cards.
Monday mornings was particularly enjoyable because we would spend 2 to 3 hours standing at the card catalogue,
placing our week's production of cards into the card catalogue.
Or at least we were only trusted to put them on the rods, as they say.
Our supervisor would come round a bit later on and check whether we had made any errors and a lecture would follow.
All this may strike you as faintly ridiculous. It was faintly ridiculous.
It was more than faintly ridiculous for people who were academic related staff with one or two degrees behind them.
And you have to remember, of course, that cataloguing was a very, very serious quasi religious matter in those days.
I'm getting close to the point now. Even in 1975, the digital world was beginning to poke its nose into the academic library.
I've mentioned the typewriter that was not quite digital, but in the corner of our floor sat a man called Mel Collier.
Somebody some of you will remember Mel. He had a very distinguished career in this country and Belgium and the Netherlands.
His job was to prepare the way for the grandly titled computer output microfilm and then a live computer terminal.
Probably the only one in the university. Now I laboured in this bizarre apprenticeship for about four years.
My dream was to move to the job of the reader's advisor.
The reader's advisor just sat at the front desk all day, had no responsibilities at all except answering the odd query.
It was wonderful, and I did get the job in the end. Now a second scene.
We're moving on. Ten years, the 1980s. Same university, same building.
I was a very late developer, but I mean a new post.
The Post is that of social studies librarian. I was in my element direct contact with readers for the first time in departments and stuff.
One of the most challenging jobs I had, the most enjoyable jobs, was doing online searches for researchers.
It was something new.
What it meant was having a long interview with them and constructing a complex search query query full of wonderfully abstruse boolean logic.
Walking in the rain down to the science library because that's where the only online terminal was and trying to contact dialogue.
We did this through the phone line and I replaced the telephone receiver having made the call into a little padded box.
It was rather like placing a sacred relic into its reliquary box.
And then you just hoped, as it emitted various screaming, whining noises, that the computer in the US was going to listen.
Right now there are two points I want to draw out of these scenes.
The first one is that academic libraries felt the digital revolution probably a lot earlier than almost any other part of the university.
But more important, it was assumed by everybody that electronic methods,
whether it was a computerised catalogue or online searching or anything else, was not just beneficial, cost effective and so on.
It was also amenable to the control of the library and the librarian.
The library could decide, could choose whether or not to adopt the technology.
If you didn't, it didn't matter. The users would be grateful for anything you could give them and I gave them a lot of rubbish.
I can tell you my online searching.
The second assumption that we all laboured under at the time was and this continued for years and years and years after the seventies and eighties,
was that the main object of our loving care as library staff was our total collection of books and periodicals.
It was the physical collection that mattered. It was the collection that was the means, the main means of satisfying our users.
And it was the collection that was the main means of persuading our universities that the library was worth supporting and worth giving money to.
Now, I admit I'm exaggerating a little.
We were not totally collection fixated. And in fact, there was a a very lively debate about how you did go about meeting user needs at the time.
Nevertheless,
those two assumptions that it was collections that defined the library and it was digital technologies which were biddable servants of the librarian.
They held sway until probably into the century. Just to take the first thing first.
Digital technologies, of course, nowadays are so ubiquitous, so deeply entrenched, and of course,
not just in higher education that those technologies appear not to be our servants any longer, but in fact, to be tyrants.
And I think that's possibly true of academic libraries. The main features of the revolution.
I don't really need to stress, but I will just mention a few of them.
Of course, virtually all staff and students are now a habitual users of the online and digital world in every form.
That gives them an operational independence from many of the services which academic libraries think they can offer.
And it reduces the constraints that are upon them.
It reduces their dependence on the library. Scholarly publications, as we've already heard, have become increasingly digital and standardised.
They reduce the uniqueness of common collections.
I come on to that in a minute. Estella said many of the collections aren't, in fact collections.
They're in digital form, rented, and they disappear as soon as you stop paying money.
They open revolution and they open access.
Revolution in particular, have allowed researchers and students to bypass the library's information channels and locate stuff for themselves.
And then, perhaps finally and most tellingly, global companies have huge power.
Companies like Google and Amazon have transformed not just the way of finding knowledge, but of providing convenient and often free access to it.
All of these things, it seems to me, have had the effect of shaking the confidence of librarians.
And even I would accept Oxford, of course, in this, reducing their standing within the institution.
I think there is some evidence that. What I want to concentrate though, on in this talk is really not things that you saw,
but the the the question of collections and particularly common collections on one hand and unique or distinctive collections on the other.
That's the distinction I want to make, rather than the distinction between digital on the one hand and physical on the other.
What do you mean by common collections? These are the printed and digital materials that form the mundane day to day information.
Resources dependent upon by students and by staff. What makes them common isn't just that they're everyday, though.
It's because they're replicated in many, many other academic libraries and other libraries across the country and across the world.
When these collections existed in printed form only as they did way back in 1975, that replication hardly mattered.
Students had no other means of getting hold of the material.
Researchers strongly valued local availability over other, less convenient means of getting hold of material.
Today, though, it's the rapid. The replication of everyday common collection takes a different form, a digital form.
University X will subscribe to much the same range of bundled electronic public periodicals.
For example, as University Y ebooks are similarly available to multiple academic libraries from the same suppliers in the same form.
And as we've seen already, these collections are not being added to an historic collection for permanent or semi-permanent retention.
They're rented for as long as the library pays up.
Next, add the fact that students, and particularly researchers now enjoy so many alternative ways of acquiring the information they need.
They don't depend on your library alone. Open Digital Repositories.
We tend to forget this. We're already around in the mid 1990s.
In some areas like particle physics, they're now much more common.
They've been joined by institutional repositories and an expanding number of open access journals.
In addition, researcher to researcher contact, which has always existed, of course, has become so much easier in all disciplines.
So resources are freely available to researchers in all sorts of different ways, even before you start adding in huge behemoths like Google Books.
Finally, how students and researchers discover what they need has changed as well, so that a lot of people,
I'm sure, now start their searches with a Google search, not a library catalogue search.
And that's important because it leads them in directions which lead away from and not to your collections.
What are the consequences then of these common collections in all academic libraries?
Since in most disciplines, digital is now the default.
That's not entirely true in the case of monographs, of course, fiscal and in knowledge and scholarly communication.
The print part of the common collection in a university library and Stella was saying, is rapidly becoming invisible.
In much the same way that in an earlier age,
books whose catalogue records were not online but only in the card catalogue became overlooked and neglected.
Librarians, of course, have given this process more momentum through labelling these prints, resources,
legacy collections and packing them off to stores and to basements, often to make way for information commons and other such things.
That in turn mirrors a change in the balance in library material budgets, which of course have moved decisively away from print towards digital.
The latest figures I could find with the 2013 to 14.
But Scala tells us for that year electronic resources accounted for 73% of information provision expenditure, compared with 45% ten years earlier.
I think it's increasingly acknowledged now that libraries need to treat common collections in print form in a new way.
If the use of them by readers is going to diminish and continue to diminish,
it then follows that the substantial resources that we've traditionally devoted to those collections,
particularly staff resources, need to be reduced.
They need to be reduced to the minimum required to make them effective. So if there are any common collection catalogues lurking in your basements.
Ask whether they're really needed.
You might switch them to supporting the digital common collections, of course, but as we've seen, they operate in a rather different way.
They come ready, packaged and they come ready labelled.
And insofar as they're rented rather than bought, they don't perhaps justify a ceremonial welcome to the library.
So again, I'd suggest that the library might devote to these collections just the minimum resources
required to make sure they're readily findable and accessible and that they're cost effective.
Now, Oxford, of course, is a legal deposit library. There is a case for saying that the legal deposit collection is a common collection.
In fact, literally, it is a common collection. In the case of electronic legal deposit,
there is just one collection for all of the legal for the six legal deposits in Britain and Ireland at legal deposit libraries in Britain and Ireland.
Should the same principle start being applied to print legal deposit?
In other words, some sort of rationalisation.
I know this has been tried in the past and it's not worked, but maybe it needs relooking at.
Common collections certainly have a future increasingly digital.
But the word collection no longer implies any fixed and definitive store.
It is there to serve the immediate needs of its intended audience, and if it ceases to do do so, it should be abandoned or adapted.
That's very, very different from what libraries were doing when I started working them.
If librarians then are not to be devoting a lot of time to common collections, what should they be doing?
What should they be devoting their time to? I think the first starting point now is the needs of the users, whether their expressed desires or not.
And I just want to give you a few examples, because this is a bit of a digression.
A few examples of areas where librarians, in my view at least, could and should be providing a service not linked to collections to their users.
First of all, promoting digital and information literacy. Information literacy.
Back in the 1970s, we called by that terrible term user education.
Does anybody remember user education? The whole books were produced on that terrible phrase.
But of course, information literacy is still alive and well. And no wonder, because there's so much information about not all of it good.
And instantly, schools seem to neglect information handling as a core skill still, which I think is an error.
Digital literacy, too, needs attention.
And where better than from the librarian? Secondly, promoting collaborative learning and research.
Stella mentioned Information Commons and collaborative working spaces that are growing within libraries.
But what about research as well? Much research, particularly in the humanities now, is becoming team based collaborative.
And shouldn't the librarian be in there, too? Embedded in collaborative teams and offering services?
Thirdly, intellectual property, which has received a lot of attention recently with changes to copyright legislation.
The long the library's long been a focus of a university's expertise in copyright and intellectual property.
When I first went to Sheffield. Somebody must have said, We're going to give that green a real test now to see if he's any good.
And we're going to ask him to revise the universities and the libraries copyright policy.
I my heart sank and I thought, oh, I really want to go back to Cardiff Place.
But it was okay. Um.
Who else but librarians really know more about intellectual property at a time when it's increasingly pertinent not just to students,
but of course, to researchers, then librarians. And finally, research communication.
Clearly, patterns of scholarly communication are in major flux.
I can't predict whether open modes of research for publication are going to become the norm or what the norm will be green or gold or whatever.
But what is obvious is that librarians are really in a good position to give advice on how that universities should manage
their own scholarly publications in the university and possibly manage the institutional repositories on their behalf.
There are probably lots and lots of other examples like data management, for example.
But those are those are just some examples of the ways in which an academic library can operate
effectively and serve in need in an area which has actually nothing to do necessarily with collections.
Now, you might have come to the conclusion by now that I've been too severe on the collection as a focus of library work.
But I want now to turn to another kind of collection.
The other the other type of collection I mentioned earlier, the unique or distinctive collection.
I should say. First of all, what I mean by the word distinctive,
I do mean the kind of collection that is traditionally labelled special collection in university libraries,
that is collections of manuscripts or books or archives or multimedia material long ago identified as requiring special treatment.
But I don't really just mean those materials, those collections.
I might mean collections that are not labelled special, but which say look within common collections.
A good example might be, for instance, a collection of research, books and periodicals once amassed systematically,
but perhaps no longer the subject of current study or research for national libraries.
A distinctive collection might mean the entire national collection in all forms.
That was certainly true of the National Library Wales.
Now research libraries UK and stellar was part of this has made a special study of this whole area of unique and distinctive collections.
And earlier this year published a report which I would strongly recommend to you if you haven't seen it.
It's called Unique and Distinctive Collections Opportunities for Research Libraries, and it's extremely stimulating.
It really does get you thinking about what's unique and distinctive collections are and how they might be approached in future.
It seems to me that as common connections become less central to a research library's interventionist role,
if you like, the distinctive collections begin to assume a much more important position than they've had in the past.
Just as the former, as I was suggesting, might consume a smaller proportion of the library's resources.
So the latter,
the unique and distinctive collections might attract much more management attention and more resources than they've received in most institutions.
I wouldn't include Oxford in that.
In a globalised and digital world of knowledge where common knowledge then sorry, common knowledge assets are beginning to lose their worth.
Unique and distinctive collections are becoming ever more valuable.
These are resources which haven't yet been hoovered up by Google or other mega companies.
If people want to use them, they need to come to you, to your door physically or maybe to your digital door.
But they need to come. This isn't a new observations.
In 1627, Gabriel Naudet, a French Frenchman who wrote a book called Advice for Setting Up a library, wrote,
There is nothing that renders a library more recommendable than when a man swimming didn't have to do with libraries,
then finds in it that which he is looking for and cannot find anywhere else.
So rather than let distinctive collections hide in dusty obscurity, not the I'm suggesting that happens in Oxford in any way.
In a basement or an attic. Starved of cash resources and staff resources.
Libraries, I suggest, should be cherishing those collections if they're any good at all,
and helping them to give both library and the parent university that special flavour which those collections give not just a flavour,
but also possibly a special attractiveness to researchers and others outside the university.
And I shouldn't really be accusing the university libraries of neglect, of course, because an awful lot of university libraries,
particularly with help from the Wolfson Foundation in the last 15 years or so,
have put an awful lot of effort into special collections and particularly the housing of them.
Just to give you an example, outside Oxford, I don't know if any of you have been to the University of Lancaster,
but if you go there and you approach the university through the main entrance,
the very first building that you see is the building that houses John Ruskin's Library.
So the university there is making a big statement really about the distinctiveness of a collection, a distinctive collection, which Lancaster has.
So what am I suggesting then, that libraries should do with those collections that they've identified as distinctive?
I should say, distinctive and significant. You might well have distinctive collections that are of no use to anybody at all.
Challenge one The first challenge is to make the collection visible, both physically and virtually.
If a distinctive collection is worth returning, it's worth developing.
Then it's worth a prominent position somewhere in your building and the visual setting that's likely to attract people who are passing by.
They may be researchers. They may not be. A very good example.
I came across a couple of years ago is the Sidney Jones Library in the University of Liverpool,
where they made a tremendous play of really quite a small and niche archive, but they made the most of it and visually it looks absolutely wonderful.
Lots of help at hand, lots of exhibition space and so on.
They really did make a statement about what they had.
A virtual presence as well as a physical one. One that's appealing.
One that's informative.
Um, one that contains not just information about the collection, but metadata and if possible, a whole lot of digitised stuff as well.
And of course, all the obligatory social networking froth on top.
You need that as well. I'll come back to the idea of visibility a bit later on.
But the second challenge is staffing.
Now I'm going to alienate nearly everybody in the room now with this next sentence.
The special collection has traditionally not in Oxford, of course,
been the home of the Scholar Bonk, the anal retentive archivist, the cataloguing pedant.
The person prepared to commune with a very, very small number of favoured readers, but otherwise reluctant to even speak with anybody else.
Well, things have changed. But the point I'm making is that libraries need, I think,
to be much more demanding of the people that they employ to look after their distinctive collections.
That's not to say that the traditional skills are not needed skills like cataloguing, conservation and collecting.
They're very, very important. But extra ones need to be added.
And this links, I think, with something which was saying right at the beginning about expanding the range of staff skills,
for example, an appreciation of new digital techniques that are applicable to collections.
The ability to negotiate the acquisition of new collections, including those in digital or hybrid form.
The capacity to engage with researchers, not just respond to them, but engage with them inside and outside the institution.
Explanatory and interpretive skills.
Teaching Skills. Mastery of publicity and marketing techniques.
Including social networking. And. Expertise at attracting finance to fund themselves.
That's not an easy thing for the traditional special collection librarians.
In short, distinctive collections and distinctive collection librarians need to cease to be guarded secrets.
They need to face outwards, both to the institution and to the wider world with the professional skills that match.
This brings me to my third challenge How do collections engage with our users?
Let's take researchers first.
The old role of curators cruelly was to look after their collections with their lives, keep the doors open, but just to jar the new curator.
We'll be doing a lot more. She'll be actively seeking out academic academic attention,
stimulating researchers to try and discover an interest in subjects that they didn't know
they had becoming familiar with the general direction of academic research in the area,
both inside and outside the institution, and also being familiar with emerging methods in the humanities and social sciences research.
I'm really referring there to digital humanities.
And all of the techniques associated with digital humanities, digitisation, crowdsourcing, big data analysis and so on.
But the new curator isn't just an observer kind of interested colleague of researchers.
Rather than just providing supplementary fodder for projects which have originated within academia.
Our new curator, she should be looking about out at how collections that she cares for can actually inspire new research endeavour.
Really excellent projects often originate through the creative conversations between library specialists and researchers,
and likewise they're developed and brought to fruition by that close kind of collaboration,
not by the researcher coming in first, the librarian coming in second.
Sometimes it's possible for libraries to take the lead in this area in quite a dramatic way.
In the National Library of Wales, which I should say is a body which is of course is not associated constitutionally,
at least with any other, with any academic institution or research institution.
In January 2011, we appointed for the very first time a professor, not something which national libraries often do,
but we had somebody from the University of Wales and we established a professor of digital collections, Lorna Hughes.
I think it was the first type of post of that kind in the world.
Lorna's aim was to try and develop our existing digital collections,
digitised collections mainly also to add new collections by forming alliances with universities not only in the UK but also abroad.
That resulted in many new projects. One which will have an echo here in Oxford,
I think is a project which was to digitise research material related to Wales and during the period of the First World War.
Four Ph.D. students joined the team.
They were all based in the library and all focussed their researches and their
studies on library collections and often on digitised library collections.
A lot of work was done on the evaluation of existing digital and digitised collections,
which is still really quite a neglected field and on enhancing existing digital collections through new means like crowdsourcing.
My own feeling and I would say this wouldn't day is that the chair was really successful.
It was an outstandingly successful. Unfortunately, it didn't continue because the funding ran out.
But it did increase the number of partnerships the library had with academic institutions.
It enlarged our profile abroad as well as in the UK.
And it grounded digital humanities, which can often appear to be an academic plan which lacks firm roots in the soil of real digital collections.
Now, national lobbies, of course, are different animals from university lobbies,
but I wonder whether university libraries might adopt one or two of those ideas.
Just as university libraries are now perfectly content and used to the idea of
undergraduate spaces being shared and catering for collaborative endeavour by students.
Could academic libraries set aside space for teams of researchers, not just on the off day or the off week.
But teams of researchers into which librarians, special collections librarians might be embedded, might might be part of the team.
Now I want to consider another facet of distinctive collections,
one that takes us beyond the realm of collections to the wider purposes of academic libraries.
Before I do that, I'll just give you the last of my little career scenes with jumping on quite a long way.
Now, it's the 1st of October 1998, and it's my first day in the National Library in Aberystwyth.
After 25 years in academic libraries, it's a bit of a jolt.
It's a standalone institution. There's no parents. There's nobody to hold your hand.
And we operate mainly in the in the Welsh language.
That was a bit of a shock for me, but I managed a body very exposed politically.
We're a year away from the National Assembly for Wales being established,
which in the end the Government of which we didn't have a culture minister breathing down your neck.
It was clear to me immediately really that in that new context, the library was in a far from ideal position.
It was almost entirely an analogue paper based institution.
Its user base was derived mainly from the surrounding area.
More sheep than people you remember. So and it's also on top of that, the users were mainly academic.
They were academic staff or students.
A new direction was urgently needed and one that was going to engage with the likely concerns of our funder, the government.
The key to survival was to throw the library open in many ways as possible to as large an audience as possible.
We set out doing that in a way which you have done here in the Bodleian very, very recently by creating a visitor centre,
by creating new exhibition and education spaces, by creating an auditorium, café, shop.
Everything else you've now got. And the point was to attract people and in particular, children in our case,
who would not necessarily have any interest at all in becoming readers in the library.
The second thing we did was to construct an alter ego.
In other words, a digital library available to users with no desire to come to Aberystwyth.
Yes, there are such people here.
We put a really heavy an emphasis on distinctive collections, not just the special collections I talked about, but much wider than that.
We had, for example, a program called the Theatre of Memory that had the aim of republishing digitally
as far as copyright restrictions would allow the entire printed heritage of Wales.
Even more ambitiously, we wanted that material to be freely available online without any barriers at all,
and if possible, to allow re-use through Creative Commons licenses.
Needless to say, only a part of that program has yet been realised.
But it's interesting that the two major parts of it, Welsh journals online and Welsh newspapers online,
have succeeded in finding huge audiences well, well beyond our traditional audiences in the library.
The result is that at least to some extent, and there's a long way to go,
the National Library has been in law condemns this phrase or maybe it was my phrase turned inside out.
It still operates, I hope, effectively as a research resource for academic researchers.
But we've succeeded in expanding the definition of researcher well beyond the academic context and also in drawing into the orbit of the library.
A huge number of people who wouldn't otherwise have dreamed of using it.
People like family and local historians, schoolchildren, tourists, journalism journalists,
media companies, community groups, artists, writers and musicians.
And lots of others. Here's one of the readers.
And now I can hear you thinking, Well, this is all very well, but we're a university library and a national library is an open a public institution.
It carries a specific cultural function. That's not.
None of this is true of university libraries, necessarily.
But I suggest there are several good reasons why appealing to a wider audience is a proper aim for any research library,
or at least a lot of research libraries, and particularly a research library holding very rich, distinctive collections.
First of all, most universities, even if the extramural duties are less of an imperative than they were in the past,
they still feel the responsibility to serve local communities, the local communities in which they're situated.
Think of departments of adult continuing education, campus art centres, public lectures and so on.
Secondly, distinctive collections almost always find research, uses and uses outside the home institution that may impose a burden of use on you.
But it's an opportunity to gain kudos far beyond your walls.
Oh, I'm finished yet. Sorry.
It'll just go round again. Maybe thirdly, in certain key areas.
Universities, of course, are coming under pressure to be relevant to the wider society.
Here I'm thinking about particularly, of course,
the RAF and its insistence that research to be graded highly has to demonstrate its relevance outside the academy.
Libraries with distinctive collections that have contributed to research submitted to the ref really
ought to be in a wonderful position to help researchers to demonstrate the public value of their work,
whether it's through arranging exhibitions, educational activities, publishing, digital material or a host of other things.
And now, of course, the body is a library which has responded to these challenges already.
And I was amazed yesterday when I was taken round the Western Library to see how well that terrible building.
Can I say that that terrible Giles Gilbert Scott's building has been gutted and then reinvented as in many ways a different kind of facility.
I think it's incredibly encouraging that the library is open to members of the public and with what one of you are called,
a [INAUDIBLE] right in entrance on Broad Street to break up that sociopathic facade.
Do you know what that means? I'm not quite sure what that means. A new public exhibition galleries, learning spaces, auditorium and so on.
The the building really has become is becoming a public as well as an academic building.
And all those visitors who are so used to wandering the central streets of the city
and being rebuffed by no admittance signs at the entrances to so many colleges,
actually find themselves welcomed and encouraged to share some of the country's greatest jewels.
And of course, scholars from outside Oxford are going to find it much easier to use the the
library's distinctive collections for which the West and provides a new home.
I think the new new Bolton is going to be quite an interesting test for the thesis that
a research library has the capacity to become a magnet for visitors to the university.
A lot will depend, obviously, on how the collections are displayed, the skills of those responsible for welcoming and interesting visitors.
I think there's probably a long way to go. TripAdvisor, by the way, Richard, currently rates the Western Library only as number 46 out of 198 Oxford.
Attractions to visitors. And I'm afraid to say you've only attracted ten reviews.
That's not very good, is it? However, however, they make up in quality what they lack in quantity.
Amazed, says one of them about the marks of Genius exhibition.
Another one says, astonishingly, there is no entrance fee.
Well, that tells you a lot. It's the experience the National Library wills is anything to go by.
And I admit that the collections are very different there. It's far from impossible to attract large numbers of appreciative visitors
while safeguarding the interests of researchers and students at the same time.
The other obvious way of throwing the research library open to the general public is,
of course, to construct and promote a virtual or online version of the library.
Again, if possible, free for all to use whenever and wherever they might be.
Of course, most. Research libraries by now display on their websites copies of items from special collections, treasures,
if you like, or online versions of exhibitions or may be the products of externally funded digitisation projects.
And all of these can give a flavour for what they find in the physical library.
But they don't really amount to an alternative digital collection.
And it's great to see Oxford again in the Vanguard.
Incidentally, when we first started digitisation in the National Library, it's the Bodleian.
We actually turned for help. So you have a very long track record.
But now with the Digital Bodleian site, which was launched two years, two weeks ago.
Yeah. And you've really managed to crack one of the really hard problems,
which is how to organise a series of very disparate digital resources created here and to present them in a consistent way and an attractive way.
And I know from experience how very, very difficult it is to do that. So many congratulations on that.
An even better example maybe is the Welcome Library.
Now, I know the welcome has oodles and oodles billions of pounds at its disposal,
but then you've got an intrinsically distinctive collection history of medicine.
And not just money, but a coherent program linked to its parents research priorities,
which is starting to make available free and online again a huge corpus of digital digitised collections.
It's interesting to read what the Wellcome Say about what they're trying to do.
I quote The Wellcome Library has followed a transformation strategy to make the library digital.
The ambition was not to create an online shop window,
but instead permanently to break the bonds imposed by a physical library and to provide full access to our collections in new and innovative ways.
We've aimed to create an entirely new digital presence based on the Wellcome Library's historic foundations and modern personality.
Well, as I said, the welcome is very fortunate in being able to draw on internal funding easily amounting to millions of pounds.
Most libraries, which are aiming at a coherent digital programme, really have a much harder for a to plough or to change to match it all.
Funding has got to be stitched together from various sources in order to create a common pattern or programme, and that's not easy to do.
The important thing, though, is to keep your eye focussed on the overall program and to build it into a resource with the mass
and the riches to become an asset that's of real benefit both within and outside your institution.
Well, it's time to stop. I hope I can you maybe provoke you into thinking about some of the more difficult
areas of collections and collection building within within universities in 2015.
And just to recap then, what I'm suggesting is just four things.
First of all, common collections are declining in significance in the priorities of individual libraries, or they should do maybe.
Instead, libraries need to offer specific information related services to their users and to their institutions,
which might or might not be based on collections.
Third,
that distinctive collections will increase in prominence and in use and as a marker of the library and the university's overall distinctiveness.
And finally, distinctive collections will form a more visible part of an institution's relationship,
which should be an active relationship with its wider, non-academic public.
Thank you very much for listening.