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 June 2005 Volume 3 (3)

Aiming Higher

Mapping access

Stuart James questions whether our HE libraries are making the most of the 'Heinekin effect'.

Quite a few years ago I was in a small group being shown around the library of an ancient Dutch university. In the course of conversation with our host the question of undergraduate access arose and he remarked to me, "Surely in a small country like Scotland you have the same arrangement as in the Netherlands, that an undergraduate at any university can use the library of any other university just on production of their id card?" I had to admit that at the time that was not the case, but that we were working on it.

We are still working on it, but are a lot further advanced than we were. The SCURL website carries an access grid (http://scurl.ac.uk/about/access.html) which has ticks for every member in the 'reference access' column. We are all members of the UK Libraries Plus and of the Research Extra schemes. The former gives borrowing access to local HE libraries for registered distance learning students of other institutions, while the latter allows lending rights for the academic staff and research postgraduate students of member libraries. In Scotland we have even extended the Research Extra scheme to the Schools of Art who otherwise did not qualify on the UK scheme.

Over and above all that, most Scottish HE libraries are involved in the various local or regional schemes (ALF, ELISA, GALT, Grampian Information or TAFLIN) which may also have local or regional implications for access rights. So far, so good. But there is still a long way to go. Mutual borrowing rights for undergraduates is a thorny issue, but one which we are starting to tackle within SCURL. And all that is only about higher education users. What about further education students? What about school pupils? And what about members of the public? The merger of the HE and FE funding councils and the removal of the divide between HE and FE is raising some interesting questions. And the lifelong learning agenda across Scotland is raising even more interesting questions. At individual university libraries we do offer services (including lending rights) to defined categories of borrower within all three of those sectors. But it is very much a series of local arrangements often on an almost institution-by-institution basis. What we need to do now is start to codify this activity, then see how much further we still have to go.

So far I have been talking about access: the reader going to the library. But what about the library going to the reader? My own experience of operating a library service for a university which aims to act as a community university for the West and South West of Scotland is that quite often our students don't find it convenient to come to us. We offer all our registered students remote access to a wide range of electronic products – databases, journals and e-books. But when we need to reach out to them the only way we can do it effectively is by working with partners, be they public libraries, local FE colleges, or hospital libraries. Call it the Heineken effect – reaching those parts other libraries can't.

In return for that support we offer a free loan support service to our partner libraries so that members of the public can get access to our bookstock. The fear that we might be swamped by requests from external users has never materialised. And other libraries across the UK report the same: opening the doors does not invite in the barbarian hordes. But we must be a pretty intimidating lot because, if anything, access schemes reveal levels of library anxiety ("I don't belong in a university library") among some members of the public which are very disheartening to those of us who think we are welcoming.

There is a lot going on in terms of access – across sectors. We need to codify all this, perhaps into route maps across library services throughout areas, regions, or the country – after all the National Library of Scotland fits into the process too. But having done that, we need to tell the people who most need to know about it – the potential users. We have a lot to boast about, and one of our major failings is that we don't boast about it. We need to market our services to actual and potential users alike and, even more importantly, take us up on our offers. And we need to make sure that our various paymasters also know about what we are doing successfully to turn their policies into reality. More of all that in the future.

Stuart James is University Librarian, University of Paisley, and Chair of the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries.

Information Scotland Vol. 3 (3) June 2005

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