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It's a real privilege to be here, and I'm so glad to have been invited.

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I love coming to Oxford. Love coming to the body every time.

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And of course, since Oxford contains the best museum in the world.

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I'm referring, of course, to Pitt Rivers. It's always worth coming from from that point of view.

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I must say, I feel in this wonderful auditorium, in a mass institute,

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that I might any moment be expected to solve the riddle of Fermat's Last Theorem, or whatever the successive paradoxes.

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Well, thank you for the invitation. It's hardly sensible of the.

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Oh, oh, I know I ought to have when I. Slides up.

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I'm not sure how I do this. Perhaps somebody can help me.

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Anyway, it's hardly sensible of the organisers, as Richard hinted,

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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.

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However, I am going to talk about the future of research libraries and as far as I can.

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I'm going to talk particularly about collections and the future of collections, and thank you so much.

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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.

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So you're going to see some lovely pictures of the South and Central Wales coast.

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I apologise to those of you from North Wales. Because I've still got 400 miles to walk.

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However, you can concentrate on what you're going to see instead of what you're going to hear.

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If you don't like it. Now, two scenes from from the life of a young librarian.

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And to begin with, I beg your indulgence.

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If I if I do some harmless reminiscing for a while trying to imagine you're in

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the newly opened Arts and Social Studies library in University College Cardiff.

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The date is the 15th of September 1975.

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I'm an assistant librarian. It's my first day, my first professional post.

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I'm sitting at a trestle table because it's a new building and the permanent furniture has not turned up yet.

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With a colleague also. His first day. My sole job is to catalogue books.

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New books. What we do is we take a slip of paper.

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Here is one. It's a very accurate copy of what we used to do.

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Take a slip of paper and write down with a biro the description of the book.

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Check it against standard forms of names.

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And Library of Congress classification numbers. And then send your slip off for checking by the person next door.

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Gradually, our desks moved apart.

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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.

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That was a tape typewriter. Does anybody remember tape typewriters?

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Yeah, a few people. It was a huge contraption that could reproduce an original card, any number of duplicate cards.

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Monday mornings was particularly enjoyable because we would spend 2 to 3 hours standing at the card catalogue,

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placing our week's production of cards into the card catalogue.

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Or at least we were only trusted to put them on the rods, as they say.

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Our supervisor would come round a bit later on and check whether we had made any errors and a lecture would follow.

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All this may strike you as faintly ridiculous. It was faintly ridiculous.

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It was more than faintly ridiculous for people who were academic related staff with one or two degrees behind them.

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And you have to remember, of course, that cataloguing was a very, very serious quasi religious matter in those days.

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I'm getting close to the point now. Even in 1975, the digital world was beginning to poke its nose into the academic library.

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I've mentioned the typewriter that was not quite digital, but in the corner of our floor sat a man called Mel Collier.

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Somebody some of you will remember Mel. He had a very distinguished career in this country and Belgium and the Netherlands.

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His job was to prepare the way for the grandly titled computer output microfilm and then a live computer terminal.

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Probably the only one in the university. Now I laboured in this bizarre apprenticeship for about four years.

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My dream was to move to the job of the reader's advisor.

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The reader's advisor just sat at the front desk all day, had no responsibilities at all except answering the odd query.

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It was wonderful, and I did get the job in the end. Now a second scene.

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We're moving on. Ten years, the 1980s. Same university, same building.

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I was a very late developer, but I mean a new post.

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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.

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One of the most challenging jobs I had, the most enjoyable jobs, was doing online searches for researchers.

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It was something new.

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What it meant was having a long interview with them and constructing a complex search query query full of wonderfully abstruse boolean logic.

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Walking in the rain down to the science library because that's where the only online terminal was and trying to contact dialogue.

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We did this through the phone line and I replaced the telephone receiver having made the call into a little padded box.

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It was rather like placing a sacred relic into its reliquary box.

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And then you just hoped, as it emitted various screaming, whining noises, that the computer in the US was going to listen.

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Right now there are two points I want to draw out of these scenes.

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The first one is that academic libraries felt the digital revolution probably a lot earlier than almost any other part of the university.

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But more important, it was assumed by everybody that electronic methods,

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whether it was a computerised catalogue or online searching or anything else, was not just beneficial, cost effective and so on.

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It was also amenable to the control of the library and the librarian.

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The library could decide, could choose whether or not to adopt the technology.

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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.

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I can tell you my online searching.

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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,

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was that the main object of our loving care as library staff was our total collection of books and periodicals.

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It was the physical collection that mattered. It was the collection that was the means, the main means of satisfying our users.

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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.

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Now, I admit I'm exaggerating a little.

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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.

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Nevertheless,

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those two assumptions that it was collections that defined the library and it was digital technologies which were biddable servants of the librarian.

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They held sway until probably into the century. Just to take the first thing first.

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Digital technologies, of course, nowadays are so ubiquitous, so deeply entrenched, and of course,

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not just in higher education that those technologies appear not to be our servants any longer, but in fact, to be tyrants.

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And I think that's possibly true of academic libraries. The main features of the revolution.

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I don't really need to stress, but I will just mention a few of them.

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Of course, virtually all staff and students are now a habitual users of the online and digital world in every form.

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That gives them an operational independence from many of the services which academic libraries think they can offer.

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And it reduces the constraints that are upon them.

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It reduces their dependence on the library. Scholarly publications, as we've already heard, have become increasingly digital and standardised.

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They reduce the uniqueness of common collections.

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I come on to that in a minute. Estella said many of the collections aren't, in fact collections.

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They're in digital form, rented, and they disappear as soon as you stop paying money.

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They open revolution and they open access.

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Revolution in particular, have allowed researchers and students to bypass the library's information channels and locate stuff for themselves.

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And then, perhaps finally and most tellingly, global companies have huge power.

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Companies like Google and Amazon have transformed not just the way of finding knowledge, but of providing convenient and often free access to it.

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All of these things, it seems to me, have had the effect of shaking the confidence of librarians.

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And even I would accept Oxford, of course, in this, reducing their standing within the institution.

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I think there is some evidence that. What I want to concentrate though, on in this talk is really not things that you saw,

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but the the the question of collections and particularly common collections on one hand and unique or distinctive collections on the other.

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That's the distinction I want to make, rather than the distinction between digital on the one hand and physical on the other.

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What do you mean by common collections? These are the printed and digital materials that form the mundane day to day information.

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Resources dependent upon by students and by staff. What makes them common isn't just that they're everyday, though.

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It's because they're replicated in many, many other academic libraries and other libraries across the country and across the world.

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When these collections existed in printed form only as they did way back in 1975, that replication hardly mattered.

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Students had no other means of getting hold of the material.

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Researchers strongly valued local availability over other, less convenient means of getting hold of material.

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Today, though, it's the rapid. The replication of everyday common collection takes a different form, a digital form.

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University X will subscribe to much the same range of bundled electronic public periodicals.

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For example, as University Y ebooks are similarly available to multiple academic libraries from the same suppliers in the same form.

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And as we've seen already, these collections are not being added to an historic collection for permanent or semi-permanent retention.

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They're rented for as long as the library pays up.

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Next, add the fact that students, and particularly researchers now enjoy so many alternative ways of acquiring the information they need.

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They don't depend on your library alone. Open Digital Repositories.

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We tend to forget this. We're already around in the mid 1990s.

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In some areas like particle physics, they're now much more common.

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They've been joined by institutional repositories and an expanding number of open access journals.

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In addition, researcher to researcher contact, which has always existed, of course, has become so much easier in all disciplines.

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So resources are freely available to researchers in all sorts of different ways, even before you start adding in huge behemoths like Google Books.

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Finally, how students and researchers discover what they need has changed as well, so that a lot of people,

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I'm sure, now start their searches with a Google search, not a library catalogue search.

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And that's important because it leads them in directions which lead away from and not to your collections.

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What are the consequences then of these common collections in all academic libraries?

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Since in most disciplines, digital is now the default.

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That's not entirely true in the case of monographs, of course, fiscal and in knowledge and scholarly communication.

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The print part of the common collection in a university library and Stella was saying, is rapidly becoming invisible.

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In much the same way that in an earlier age,

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books whose catalogue records were not online but only in the card catalogue became overlooked and neglected.

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Librarians, of course, have given this process more momentum through labelling these prints, resources,

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legacy collections and packing them off to stores and to basements, often to make way for information commons and other such things.

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That in turn mirrors a change in the balance in library material budgets, which of course have moved decisively away from print towards digital.

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The latest figures I could find with the 2013 to 14.

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But Scala tells us for that year electronic resources accounted for 73% of information provision expenditure, compared with 45% ten years earlier.

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I think it's increasingly acknowledged now that libraries need to treat common collections in print form in a new way.

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If the use of them by readers is going to diminish and continue to diminish,

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it then follows that the substantial resources that we've traditionally devoted to those collections,

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particularly staff resources, need to be reduced.

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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.

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Ask whether they're really needed.

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You might switch them to supporting the digital common collections, of course, but as we've seen, they operate in a rather different way.

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They come ready, packaged and they come ready labelled.

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And insofar as they're rented rather than bought, they don't perhaps justify a ceremonial welcome to the library.

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So again, I'd suggest that the library might devote to these collections just the minimum resources

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required to make sure they're readily findable and accessible and that they're cost effective.

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Now, Oxford, of course, is a legal deposit library. There is a case for saying that the legal deposit collection is a common collection.

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In fact, literally, it is a common collection. In the case of electronic legal deposit,

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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.

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Should the same principle start being applied to print legal deposit?

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In other words, some sort of rationalisation.

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I know this has been tried in the past and it's not worked, but maybe it needs relooking at.

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Common collections certainly have a future increasingly digital.

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But the word collection no longer implies any fixed and definitive store.

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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.

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That's very, very different from what libraries were doing when I started working them.

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If librarians then are not to be devoting a lot of time to common collections, what should they be doing?

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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.

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And I just want to give you a few examples, because this is a bit of a digression.

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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.

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First of all, promoting digital and information literacy. Information literacy.

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Back in the 1970s, we called by that terrible term user education.

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Does anybody remember user education? The whole books were produced on that terrible phrase.

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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.

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And instantly, schools seem to neglect information handling as a core skill still, which I think is an error.

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Digital literacy, too, needs attention.

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And where better than from the librarian? Secondly, promoting collaborative learning and research.

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Stella mentioned Information Commons and collaborative working spaces that are growing within libraries.

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But what about research as well? Much research, particularly in the humanities now, is becoming team based collaborative.

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And shouldn't the librarian be in there, too? Embedded in collaborative teams and offering services?

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Thirdly, intellectual property, which has received a lot of attention recently with changes to copyright legislation.

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The long the library's long been a focus of a university's expertise in copyright and intellectual property.

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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.

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And we're going to ask him to revise the universities and the libraries copyright policy.

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I my heart sank and I thought, oh, I really want to go back to Cardiff Place.

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But it was okay. Um.

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Who else but librarians really know more about intellectual property at a time when it's increasingly pertinent not just to students,

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but of course, to researchers, then librarians. And finally, research communication.

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Clearly, patterns of scholarly communication are in major flux.

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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.

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But what is obvious is that librarians are really in a good position to give advice on how that universities should manage

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their own scholarly publications in the university and possibly manage the institutional repositories on their behalf.

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There are probably lots and lots of other examples like data management, for example.

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But those are those are just some examples of the ways in which an academic library can operate

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effectively and serve in need in an area which has actually nothing to do necessarily with collections.

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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.

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But I want now to turn to another kind of collection.

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The other the other type of collection I mentioned earlier, the unique or distinctive collection.

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I should say. First of all, what I mean by the word distinctive,

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I do mean the kind of collection that is traditionally labelled special collection in university libraries,

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that is collections of manuscripts or books or archives or multimedia material long ago identified as requiring special treatment.

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But I don't really just mean those materials, those collections.

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I might mean collections that are not labelled special, but which say look within common collections.

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A good example might be, for instance, a collection of research, books and periodicals once amassed systematically,

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but perhaps no longer the subject of current study or research for national libraries.

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A distinctive collection might mean the entire national collection in all forms.

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That was certainly true of the National Library Wales.

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Now research libraries UK and stellar was part of this has made a special study of this whole area of unique and distinctive collections.

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And earlier this year published a report which I would strongly recommend to you if you haven't seen it.

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It's called Unique and Distinctive Collections Opportunities for Research Libraries, and it's extremely stimulating.

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It really does get you thinking about what's unique and distinctive collections are and how they might be approached in future.

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It seems to me that as common connections become less central to a research library's interventionist role,

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if you like, the distinctive collections begin to assume a much more important position than they've had in the past.

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Just as the former, as I was suggesting, might consume a smaller proportion of the library's resources.

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So the latter,

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the unique and distinctive collections might attract much more management attention and more resources than they've received in most institutions.

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I wouldn't include Oxford in that.

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In a globalised and digital world of knowledge where common knowledge then sorry, common knowledge assets are beginning to lose their worth.

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Unique and distinctive collections are becoming ever more valuable.

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These are resources which haven't yet been hoovered up by Google or other mega companies.

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If people want to use them, they need to come to you, to your door physically or maybe to your digital door.

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But they need to come. This isn't a new observations.

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In 1627, Gabriel Naudet, a French Frenchman who wrote a book called Advice for Setting Up a library, wrote,

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There is nothing that renders a library more recommendable than when a man swimming didn't have to do with libraries,

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then finds in it that which he is looking for and cannot find anywhere else.

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So rather than let distinctive collections hide in dusty obscurity, not the I'm suggesting that happens in Oxford in any way.

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In a basement or an attic. Starved of cash resources and staff resources.

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Libraries, I suggest, should be cherishing those collections if they're any good at all,

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and helping them to give both library and the parent university that special flavour which those collections give not just a flavour,

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but also possibly a special attractiveness to researchers and others outside the university.

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And I shouldn't really be accusing the university libraries of neglect, of course, because an awful lot of university libraries,

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particularly with help from the Wolfson Foundation in the last 15 years or so,

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have put an awful lot of effort into special collections and particularly the housing of them.

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Just to give you an example, outside Oxford, I don't know if any of you have been to the University of Lancaster,

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but if you go there and you approach the university through the main entrance,

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the very first building that you see is the building that houses John Ruskin's Library.

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So the university there is making a big statement really about the distinctiveness of a collection, a distinctive collection, which Lancaster has.

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So what am I suggesting then, that libraries should do with those collections that they've identified as distinctive?

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I should say, distinctive and significant. You might well have distinctive collections that are of no use to anybody at all.

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Challenge one The first challenge is to make the collection visible, both physically and virtually.

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If a distinctive collection is worth returning, it's worth developing.

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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.

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They may be researchers. They may not be. A very good example.

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I came across a couple of years ago is the Sidney Jones Library in the University of Liverpool,

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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.

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Lots of help at hand, lots of exhibition space and so on.

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They really did make a statement about what they had.

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A virtual presence as well as a physical one. One that's appealing.

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One that's informative.

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Um, one that contains not just information about the collection, but metadata and if possible, a whole lot of digitised stuff as well.

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And of course, all the obligatory social networking froth on top.

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You need that as well. I'll come back to the idea of visibility a bit later on.

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But the second challenge is staffing.

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Now I'm going to alienate nearly everybody in the room now with this next sentence.

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The special collection has traditionally not in Oxford, of course,

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been the home of the Scholar Bonk, the anal retentive archivist, the cataloguing pedant.

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The person prepared to commune with a very, very small number of favoured readers, but otherwise reluctant to even speak with anybody else.

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Well, things have changed. But the point I'm making is that libraries need, I think,

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to be much more demanding of the people that they employ to look after their distinctive collections.

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That's not to say that the traditional skills are not needed skills like cataloguing, conservation and collecting.

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They're very, very important. But extra ones need to be added.

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And this links, I think, with something which was saying right at the beginning about expanding the range of staff skills,

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for example, an appreciation of new digital techniques that are applicable to collections.

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The ability to negotiate the acquisition of new collections, including those in digital or hybrid form.

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The capacity to engage with researchers, not just respond to them, but engage with them inside and outside the institution.

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Explanatory and interpretive skills.

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Teaching Skills. Mastery of publicity and marketing techniques.

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Including social networking. And. Expertise at attracting finance to fund themselves.

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That's not an easy thing for the traditional special collection librarians.

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In short, distinctive collections and distinctive collection librarians need to cease to be guarded secrets.

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They need to face outwards, both to the institution and to the wider world with the professional skills that match.

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This brings me to my third challenge How do collections engage with our users?

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Let's take researchers first.

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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.

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We'll be doing a lot more. She'll be actively seeking out academic academic attention,

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stimulating researchers to try and discover an interest in subjects that they didn't know

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they had becoming familiar with the general direction of academic research in the area,

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both inside and outside the institution, and also being familiar with emerging methods in the humanities and social sciences research.

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I'm really referring there to digital humanities.

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And all of the techniques associated with digital humanities, digitisation, crowdsourcing, big data analysis and so on.

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But the new curator isn't just an observer kind of interested colleague of researchers.

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Rather than just providing supplementary fodder for projects which have originated within academia.

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Our new curator, she should be looking about out at how collections that she cares for can actually inspire new research endeavour.

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Really excellent projects often originate through the creative conversations between library specialists and researchers,

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and likewise they're developed and brought to fruition by that close kind of collaboration,

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not by the researcher coming in first, the librarian coming in second.

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Sometimes it's possible for libraries to take the lead in this area in quite a dramatic way.

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In the National Library of Wales, which I should say is a body which is of course is not associated constitutionally,

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at least with any other, with any academic institution or research institution.

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In January 2011, we appointed for the very first time a professor, not something which national libraries often do,

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but we had somebody from the University of Wales and we established a professor of digital collections, Lorna Hughes.

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I think it was the first type of post of that kind in the world.

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Lorna's aim was to try and develop our existing digital collections,

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digitised collections mainly also to add new collections by forming alliances with universities not only in the UK but also abroad.

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That resulted in many new projects. One which will have an echo here in Oxford,

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I think is a project which was to digitise research material related to Wales and during the period of the First World War.

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Four Ph.D. students joined the team.

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They were all based in the library and all focussed their researches and their

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studies on library collections and often on digitised library collections.

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A lot of work was done on the evaluation of existing digital and digitised collections,

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which is still really quite a neglected field and on enhancing existing digital collections through new means like crowdsourcing.

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My own feeling and I would say this wouldn't day is that the chair was really successful.

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It was an outstandingly successful. Unfortunately, it didn't continue because the funding ran out.

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But it did increase the number of partnerships the library had with academic institutions.

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It enlarged our profile abroad as well as in the UK.

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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.

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Now, national lobbies, of course, are different animals from university lobbies,

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but I wonder whether university libraries might adopt one or two of those ideas.

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Just as university libraries are now perfectly content and used to the idea of

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undergraduate spaces being shared and catering for collaborative endeavour by students.

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Could academic libraries set aside space for teams of researchers, not just on the off day or the off week.

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But teams of researchers into which librarians, special collections librarians might be embedded, might might be part of the team.

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Now I want to consider another facet of distinctive collections,

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one that takes us beyond the realm of collections to the wider purposes of academic libraries.

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Before I do that, I'll just give you the last of my little career scenes with jumping on quite a long way.

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Now, it's the 1st of October 1998, and it's my first day in the National Library in Aberystwyth.

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After 25 years in academic libraries, it's a bit of a jolt.

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It's a standalone institution. There's no parents. There's nobody to hold your hand.

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And we operate mainly in the in the Welsh language.

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That was a bit of a shock for me, but I managed a body very exposed politically.

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We're a year away from the National Assembly for Wales being established,

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which in the end the Government of which we didn't have a culture minister breathing down your neck.

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It was clear to me immediately really that in that new context, the library was in a far from ideal position.

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It was almost entirely an analogue paper based institution.

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Its user base was derived mainly from the surrounding area.

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More sheep than people you remember. So and it's also on top of that, the users were mainly academic.

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They were academic staff or students.

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A new direction was urgently needed and one that was going to engage with the likely concerns of our funder, the government.

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The key to survival was to throw the library open in many ways as possible to as large an audience as possible.

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We set out doing that in a way which you have done here in the Bodleian very, very recently by creating a visitor centre,

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by creating new exhibition and education spaces, by creating an auditorium, café, shop.

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Everything else you've now got. And the point was to attract people and in particular, children in our case,

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who would not necessarily have any interest at all in becoming readers in the library.

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The second thing we did was to construct an alter ego.

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In other words, a digital library available to users with no desire to come to Aberystwyth.

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Yes, there are such people here.

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We put a really heavy an emphasis on distinctive collections, not just the special collections I talked about, but much wider than that.

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We had, for example, a program called the Theatre of Memory that had the aim of republishing digitally

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as far as copyright restrictions would allow the entire printed heritage of Wales.

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Even more ambitiously, we wanted that material to be freely available online without any barriers at all,

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and if possible, to allow re-use through Creative Commons licenses.

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Needless to say, only a part of that program has yet been realised.

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But it's interesting that the two major parts of it, Welsh journals online and Welsh newspapers online,

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have succeeded in finding huge audiences well, well beyond our traditional audiences in the library.

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The result is that at least to some extent, and there's a long way to go,

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the National Library has been in law condemns this phrase or maybe it was my phrase turned inside out.

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It still operates, I hope, effectively as a research resource for academic researchers.

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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.

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A huge number of people who wouldn't otherwise have dreamed of using it.

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People like family and local historians, schoolchildren, tourists, journalism journalists,

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media companies, community groups, artists, writers and musicians.

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And lots of others. Here's one of the readers.

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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.

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It carries a specific cultural function. That's not.

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None of this is true of university libraries, necessarily.

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But I suggest there are several good reasons why appealing to a wider audience is a proper aim for any research library,

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or at least a lot of research libraries, and particularly a research library holding very rich, distinctive collections.

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First of all, most universities, even if the extramural duties are less of an imperative than they were in the past,

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they still feel the responsibility to serve local communities, the local communities in which they're situated.

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Think of departments of adult continuing education, campus art centres, public lectures and so on.

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Secondly, distinctive collections almost always find research, uses and uses outside the home institution that may impose a burden of use on you.

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But it's an opportunity to gain kudos far beyond your walls.

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Oh, I'm finished yet. Sorry.

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It'll just go round again. Maybe thirdly, in certain key areas.

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Universities, of course, are coming under pressure to be relevant to the wider society.

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Here I'm thinking about particularly, of course,

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the RAF and its insistence that research to be graded highly has to demonstrate its relevance outside the academy.

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Libraries with distinctive collections that have contributed to research submitted to the ref really

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ought to be in a wonderful position to help researchers to demonstrate the public value of their work,

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whether it's through arranging exhibitions, educational activities, publishing, digital material or a host of other things.

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And now, of course, the body is a library which has responded to these challenges already.

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And I was amazed yesterday when I was taken round the Western Library to see how well that terrible building.

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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.

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I think it's incredibly encouraging that the library is open to members of the public and with what one of you are called,

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a [INAUDIBLE] right in entrance on Broad Street to break up that sociopathic facade.

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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.

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The the building really has become is becoming a public as well as an academic building.

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And all those visitors who are so used to wandering the central streets of the city

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and being rebuffed by no admittance signs at the entrances to so many colleges,

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actually find themselves welcomed and encouraged to share some of the country's greatest jewels.

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And of course, scholars from outside Oxford are going to find it much easier to use the the

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library's distinctive collections for which the West and provides a new home.

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I think the new new Bolton is going to be quite an interesting test for the thesis that

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a research library has the capacity to become a magnet for visitors to the university.

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A lot will depend, obviously, on how the collections are displayed, the skills of those responsible for welcoming and interesting visitors.

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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.

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Attractions to visitors. And I'm afraid to say you've only attracted ten reviews.

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That's not very good, is it? However, however, they make up in quality what they lack in quantity.

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Amazed, says one of them about the marks of Genius exhibition.

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Another one says, astonishingly, there is no entrance fee.

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Well, that tells you a lot. It's the experience the National Library wills is anything to go by.

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And I admit that the collections are very different there. It's far from impossible to attract large numbers of appreciative visitors

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while safeguarding the interests of researchers and students at the same time.

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The other obvious way of throwing the research library open to the general public is,

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of course, to construct and promote a virtual or online version of the library.

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Again, if possible, free for all to use whenever and wherever they might be.

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Of course, most. Research libraries by now display on their websites copies of items from special collections, treasures,

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if you like, or online versions of exhibitions or may be the products of externally funded digitisation projects.

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And all of these can give a flavour for what they find in the physical library.

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But they don't really amount to an alternative digital collection.

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And it's great to see Oxford again in the Vanguard.

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Incidentally, when we first started digitisation in the National Library, it's the Bodleian.

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We actually turned for help. So you have a very long track record.

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But now with the Digital Bodleian site, which was launched two years, two weeks ago.

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Yeah. And you've really managed to crack one of the really hard problems,

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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.

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And I know from experience how very, very difficult it is to do that. So many congratulations on that.

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An even better example maybe is the Welcome Library.

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Now, I know the welcome has oodles and oodles billions of pounds at its disposal,

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but then you've got an intrinsically distinctive collection history of medicine.

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And not just money, but a coherent program linked to its parents research priorities,

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which is starting to make available free and online again a huge corpus of digital digitised collections.

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It's interesting to read what the Wellcome Say about what they're trying to do.

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I quote The Wellcome Library has followed a transformation strategy to make the library digital.

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The ambition was not to create an online shop window,

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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.

400
00:46:10,610 --> 00:46:18,710
We've aimed to create an entirely new digital presence based on the Wellcome Library's historic foundations and modern personality.

401
00:46:20,610 --> 00:46:28,200
Well, as I said, the welcome is very fortunate in being able to draw on internal funding easily amounting to millions of pounds.

402
00:46:29,460 --> 00:46:37,650
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.

403
00:46:38,040 --> 00:46:45,360
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.

404
00:46:47,210 --> 00:46:53,510
The important thing, though, is to keep your eye focussed on the overall program and to build it into a resource with the mass

405
00:46:53,510 --> 00:46:59,690
and the riches to become an asset that's of real benefit both within and outside your institution.

406
00:47:02,300 --> 00:47:10,220
Well, it's time to stop. I hope I can you maybe provoke you into thinking about some of the more difficult

407
00:47:10,220 --> 00:47:17,420
areas of collections and collection building within within universities in 2015.

408
00:47:18,370 --> 00:47:22,130
And just to recap then, what I'm suggesting is just four things.

409
00:47:22,340 --> 00:47:30,620
First of all, common collections are declining in significance in the priorities of individual libraries, or they should do maybe.

410
00:47:32,180 --> 00:47:39,860
Instead, libraries need to offer specific information related services to their users and to their institutions,

411
00:47:39,860 --> 00:47:42,920
which might or might not be based on collections.

412
00:47:44,030 --> 00:47:44,429
Third,

413
00:47:44,430 --> 00:47:53,270
that distinctive collections will increase in prominence and in use and as a marker of the library and the university's overall distinctiveness.

414
00:47:54,260 --> 00:48:01,640
And finally, distinctive collections will form a more visible part of an institution's relationship,

415
00:48:02,060 --> 00:48:07,790
which should be an active relationship with its wider, non-academic public.

416
00:48:08,510 --> 00:48:09,620
Thank you very much for listening.