British Librarianship and Information Work 2001–2005

J.H. Bowman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138262584
• eBook ISBN: 9781317171874
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This important reference volume covers developments in aspects of British library and information work during the five year period 2001-2005. Over forty contributors, all of whom are experts in their subject, provide an overview of their field along with extensive further references which act as a starting point for further research. The book provides a comprehensive record of library and information management during the past five years and will be essential reading for all scholars, library professionals and students.

1

National libraries

Stephen Bury

Between 2001 and 2005 the world of information changed at an unprecedented rate: for example, in 2001 it would have been hard to predict the panoply of Google services from Google Scholar to Google Earth, or that Amazon would be selling the chapters of individual books over the web. This would pose great problems for any library but national libraries, relatively large, laborious in their governance structures, and with very large legacy systems, faced particular difficulties. This chapter will outline how the three national libraries of Britain responded to these challenges. It is written by a member of British Library staff, and it reflects his personal view. It is emphatically not the viewpoint of the British Library.

Strategy

All three national libraries undertook strategic reviews during this period, not only to meet the changes in scholarly communications but also to adjust to the revival of the Scottish Parliament and the creation of the Welsh Assembly, and to cope with a raft of governmental legislation: the Freedom of Information Act (in force from January 2005), the Disability Discrimination Act and the implementation of the European Copyright Directive.

In 2001 the British Library launched a major consultation with its users with its New strategic directions for the British Library.1 There were over 5,000 responses, which largely endorsed the themes of working in collaboration and partnership, increasing the understanding of user needs, widening access to collections and services and accelerating the Library’s e-strategy. The leitmotif of the hybrid library was also present in the National Library of Scotland’s public consultation ‘A National Library for the 21st Century’ (2000/01), leading up to the ‘Breaking through the walls’ strategy, launched in March 2004,2 and in the National Library of Wales earlier consultation ‘Choosing the future’ (1999), with its emphasis on both physical and virtual access (the Visitor Centre and the Digital Library), resulting in its corporate plan 2000/01 ‘Digital Library, Open Library’. The Welsh Assembly’s strategic documents, Wales: a better country, Creative future and Making the connections also modulated the strategy of the National Library of Wales in 2004/05.3

If a strategy was needed for national libraries to meet the demands the 21st century, it was felt at the British Library that a capacity to develop strategy as and when required was also needed. In May 2003 the Library appointed its first Head of Strategy and Planning, Caroline Pung. Early fruits of this development were the formulation of Redefining the library and Measuring our value.4 The former redefined the British Library’s role in the research information cycle and outlined the its strategies for research in science, technology and medicine in higher education and industry; the social sciences in higher education and the practitioner communities; and research in the arts and humanities in higher education and the creative industries. It also defined the strategic priorities of enriching the user’s experience, building the digital research library, transforming search and navigation, growing and managing the national collection, developing its people and guaranteeing financial sustainability.

Economic impact assessment

Measuring our value deployed the contingent valuation method (CVM) championed by the Nobel Prize-winning economists, Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow, to determine the direct and indirect value – economic, cultural, social and intellectual – added by the British Library to the nation.5 Traditionally, this had used the qualitative method of case studies. A carefully designed questionnaire measured the consumer surplus value of the British Library’s reading rooms, the document supply service and the very existence of the British Library: over 2,000 people were asked:

• how much they would be willing to pay for the Library’s continued existence

• what was the minimum payment they would be willing to accept to forgo the Library’s existence

• how much they invested in terms of time and money to make use of the Library

• how much they would have to pay to use alternatives to the Library, if such alternatives could be found.

The conclusions were that the total value each year of the British Library was £363 million (of which £304 million was indirect value and £59 million direct value); for every £1 of public funding the British Library received annually, £4.40 was generated for the UK economy; and if the British Library did not exist, the UK would lose £280 million of economic value per annum.6

Management

2001–2005 saw further changes in the management structures of all three libraries. In 2001 Lynne Brindley, appointed in July 2000, completed a top-tier restructuring, abolishing the posts of director-general and introducing an executive team consisting of directors of Operations and Services, Scholarship and Collections, Strategic Marketing and Communications, e-Strategy, Finance and Corporate Resources. Within Scholarship and Collections the distinct focus on special collections was replaced by a structure based on three areas: British, European & American, and Asia, Pacific and Africa. In February 2004 the new post of Head of Higher Education was created.

The National Library of Wales completed its restructuring in January 2002 with the creation of three departments: Collection Services, Corporate Services and Public Services. It also abolished so-called ‘curatorial’ departments based on differentiation by medium of material.

At the National Library of Scotland, Ian McGowan was replaced as Director by Martyn Wade in September 2002. In 2003 a new departmental structure was implemented with four directorates: Collection Development, Corporate Services, Customer Services (including cataloguing, education, reference services and inter-library loans) and Development and Marketing.

Staff development

The strategies of all three national libraries prioritized their staff and their development as keys to delivering strategy. Each library had a different approach: the National Library of Wales gained Investors in People accreditation in November 2003, whilst in 2004 the British Library introduced a radical competency-based performance system which was intended to be eventually linked to performance pay: objectives were to be modulated by the way they had been achieved.

The 21st Century Curator Project

2002 saw the launch of the British Library’s 21st Century Curator Project in order to explore how content experts could straddle traditional expertise in palaeography, historical bibliography etc., with skills in digitization, writing for the web, project management and the emerging new forms of scholarly communication – institutional repositories for pre- and post-print research papers, blogs, wikis, mash-ups, folksonomies, etc. Between 2003 and 2004 there was an Andrew W. Mellon-funded project with the New York Public Library to use curatorial exchanges, benchmarking and a conference, including an international panel of curators, librarians, and archivists, to see if there were common solutions to common problems.7 Research breaks, a research register, an externally validated research assessment exercise, an institutional repository, and professional competencies for the new performance management system were just some of the results of this initiative.

On-site services

All three libraries saw efforts to improve the reader and visitor experience. June 2004 saw the opening at the National Library of Wales of the Drwm, the second phase of a £5 million visitor experience project, funded by the National Lottery Fund. Phase 1 had been improved accommodation for the National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales. Phase 2 created an air-conditioned 100 person space for films, live performances and lectures. Above the Drwm, the Hengwrt gallery was opened to allow such treasures as the Black book of Carmarthen, The book of Llandaf, Turner’s painting of Dolbadarn Castle or George Owen’s map of Pembrokeshire to be displayed to the highest possible conservation standard. Meanwhile, the Peniarth Room was refurbished for temporary exhibitions.8 In October 2004 the South Reading Room was re-opened with refurbished accommodation for manuscripts, maps and microforms.

At the National Library of Scotland planning took place in 2004 to open up the front hall of the George IV Bridge building, long perceived as a barrier to access. Completion was planned for mid-2006 with further enhancements such as a self-registration scheme for readers, smartcard technology and wireless broadband internet.

The changes in the information patterns for science, patents and business led to different approaches by national libraries to reading room provision in these areas. The National Library of Scotland closed its separate science and business reading rooms in December 2001: physical materials would now be consulted in the general reading rooms, whilst SCOTBIS provided a virtual business information service.9

Meanwhile the British Library repurposed one of its Patents reading rooms into an enlarged Social Sciences Reading Room, and planned a Business and Intellectual Property Centre in the remaining Patents Reading Room. A pilot for this latter began in May 2004 with a planned building of training rooms and a networking area, funded by the London Development Agency, for an April 2006 opening.

In the interests of social inclusion, the British Library simplified its admissions rules: what was required was a need to use the Library, proof of address and signature. A store directory and new signage were introduced. A series of events, performances and concerts were arranged to enlarge the size and composition of the traditional British Library audience. Again, all three libraries tried to address the social inclusion agenda of the Labour government, by attracting new audiences and developing new services, such as roadshows and touring exhibitions.

The British Library attempted to join up its services for remote and onsite readers, as the electronic blurred this dichotomy.10 The front hall become one of the largest wi-fi (wireless fidelity, a term for a wireless local area network) spaces in the UK; readers were enabled (as at the National Library of Scotland from September 2004) to order reading room items in advance from the web. And indeed exhibitions at all three libraries had virtual galleries on their respective websites.

Remote services

Websites

The period saw the emergence of different approaches (often within the same institution) to the national library website: was it an intermediary or guide to the services of that library? Was it the virtual equivalent, down to departmental structures, of the libraries? Was it another library, offering content to many who would be unable to use the physical or inter-library loan facilities of that library? The 2001/02 annual report of the British Library described the website as ‘a comprehensive guide to the Library’s collections and services’: it had over 15 million ‘views of individual pages’. At the end of 2005 page hits stood at just under 41 million. The equivalent figure for the National Library of Scotland was just over 15 million.

Digital content was one of the main drivers of this new traffic. For example, the addition of the original manuscript of Lewis Carroll’s Alice to the British Library’s Turning the Pages on 21 September 2005 resulted in over 1 million requests for images in both October and November.

The three libraries became much more conscious of the centrality of their websites and made important developments in their appearance and functionality. In the British Library’s case British Library Direct, the application of Google’s search engine appliance to the site in 2004, the restructuring of the home page by target audience and the adaptation of the award-winning...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 National libraries
• 2 Public libraries
• 3 From social inclusion to community cohesion
• 4 Community information
• 5 University libraries
• 6 Colleges of further education
• 7 Services to children, young people and schools
• 8 Government libraries
• 9 Learned, professional and independent libraries
• 10 Library and information history
• 11 Rare book librarianship and historical bibliography
• 12 Art libraries
• 13 Music libraries
• 14 Media libraries
• 15 Map libraries
• 16 Local studies
• 17 Archives
• 18 British and European Union official publications
• 19 Patents
• 20 The book trade
• 21 The internet and libraries
• 22 Education and training
• 23 Research
• 24 Library buildings
• 25 Cooperation
• 26 Marketing
• 27 Information literacy
• 28 Library management systems
• 29 Cataloguing
• 30 Classification and subject organization and retrieval
• 31 Indexing and abstracting
• 32 Preservation
• Index