it's difficult to blog workshops. So much of the content is in the exchanges between the participants, hard to capture except in a video of the proceedings.
Ruth Curry of the Research Information Network presented on the theme, Library what library? Building on Steve Smith's remarks, she pointed to a future of prolonged significant cuts. It's too late for efficiency savings, which have already been made. There will be a much greater emphasis on shared services, including sharing with FE. Stock and staff will be hit hard, and it remains to be seen whether ring-fencing of STM (science, technology and medicine) will persist. Journals budgets have been growing at the expense of book budgets. Extra student places have been cut by half, Welsh universities are starting to share, we must expect significant losses.
There will also be, though neither Ruth nor Steve Smith referred to this, some institutional closures and take-overs, in both FE and HE. The weak will go to the wall.
In the new situation, libraries have to show how they add value to educational institutions. Among the services that could be shared are access, purchasing, management of digital resources, catalogues and cataloguing, the LMS, storage, disposal and training. How much use is made of other peoples libraries? [In FE, zero-TR]
We need to focus on academic priorities, on research and user needs. Ruth shared some work RIN had commissioned on researchers' behaviour. They value speed and convenience, use a narrow range of sources, and are put off by pay walls. They continue to need quiet space. Students show many of the same characteristics. They tend to pick and dip and use services in the early hours.
Then we worked in groups and were encouraged by Sally to think the unthinkable.
The second workshop, by Leo Appleton, on branding a super-converged service, is less easy to describe; I would have liked to have heard more about how he and his team had developed their service, and less about the general aspects of brands in the modern world, which was mostly devoted to multi-national monopoly capitalist organisations.