Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal February 2005 Volume 3 (1)

Aiming Higher

A whistle stop tour

In an all-round look at HE and research libraries, Stuart James highlights some of the most important issues and how the community is addressing them.

The most immediate issue facing HE libraries in Scotland at the time of writing is the resignation of the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL) Development Director, and initial correspondent for this column, to take up the post of Head of Learning Resources at the Glasgow School of Art. So, as a stop-gap, the post of correspondent falls to the Chair of SCURL. One way and another various initiatives coming out of SCURL have been reported to the profession and it is appropriate to thank Catherine Nicholson for the energy and ability she has applied to making these various projects successes.

Rather than concentrate on a single issue, as did Catherine’s last column, I shall for this one at least range over various issues facing HE libraries and touch briefly on some projects in SCURL and elsewhere which are trying to address them.

The first point, of course, is that most of these issues are by no means exclusive to HE. With the merger of the Higher Education and Further Education Funding Councils in Scotland we face a new (or perhaps not new, but certainly more prominent) agenda in the interface between HE and FE. This is already very much a two-way process: many FE students come directly onto degree courses in HE and in fact provide a significant proportion of student intake to some universities. JISC services have now been extended into FE and have given the network a welcome impetus into creation and provision of online teaching materials. E-learning is spread equally between the sectors as virtual learning environments (VLEs) become more widespread. There is plenty of experience to be shared among FE and HE in integrating library services with VLEs, and more widely within e-learning, and a lot of work still be done.

I write this having just completed the annual torture, as it seems, of compiling my statistical return to Sconul: it is a chore, but the performance indicators and benchmarking possibilities we derive from the published version are of considerable interest and often of great value in presenting resource cases and planning future service developments. In terms of quality assessment, HE libraries approach the matter in various ways, either with home-grown surveys or by using the Libqual service. FE, of course, recently produced its own self-evaluation toolkit which has been featured in Information Scotland.

SCURL has for many years, through its Access Sub-Group, brokered access agreements among Scottish HE libraries; at the same time we all participate in UK-wide schemes such as UK Libraries Plus and Sconul Research Extra. The SCURL matrix is being looked at again to see how it can be extended further. If that takes a national view, there are also of course local schemes which extend access across the sectors. I have seen some interesting approaches to mapping access to library and information services on both national and local bases, and these could usefully be developed in Scotland. What we also need to do now is to look at what we have achieved, brand it and market it all effectively. Neither a simple or cheap option, but essential if we are to continue to extend our services, encourage people to use them, and get the credit for what we are doing.

In its submissions to the Cultural Commission SCURL has pointed out the continuing, and permanent, value and relevance of collections: there is great potential advantage in collaboration for collection storage initially, hence the CASS (Collaborative Academic Store for Scotland) Project which is half-way through its pilot phase. A future column in this series will almost certainly feature this project in more detail, but suffice to say here that storage is just the beginning. CASS is identifying issues of how (and by whom), not just to store lesser used materials, but to build them into a viable long-term research collection for the whole Scottish community.

Similarly, SSISWG (Scottish Science Information Strategy Working Group) is looking at providing scientific and technical information to the whole community, in terms of central purchasing, portal development and open access archives.

Open access is something else that will be treated in more detail in a future article, but developments are pushing ahead in Scotland with most Scottish universities now having signed up to a Scottish declaration to place research papers (and other materials) from their institutions into electronic open access archives to make them available freely to any interested users.

There is a lot going on, and a lot more that needs to be done. This whistle-stop tour of some projects and themes gives an overview of the kind of things going on within HE and between HE and other sectors.

Future regular articles will look at individual issues in more detail, and will indicate their significance both within HE and more widely for the library and information community in Scotland.

Stuart James is Chair, Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL).

Information Scotland Vol. 3 (1) February 2005

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