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 December 2006 Volume 4(6)

Libraries in HE

The University of where?

In August 2005, Gillian Anderson became the first Librarian of the UHI Millennium Institute. Here she outlines the remit and challenges of developing a library service for Scotland’s new, dispersed Higher Education Institution.

The University of the Highlands & Islands doesn’t exist – yet. UHI Millennium Institute (UHI) was designated by the Privy Council in 2001 as a higher education institution. It provides university-level education through a federal collegiate partnership of 15 colleges and research institutions (the UHI academic partners), co-ordinated by the UHI Executive Office based in Inverness.

Each academic partner has its own distinctive character. Some are relatively large colleges in urban centres such as Elgin and Inverness, others are smaller institutions, such as the Highland Theological College in Dingwall. Some have a primary focus on research, such as the Scottish Association for Marine Science near Oban. There are also more than 80 learning centres located in the more isolated communities throughout the Highlands and Islands. Currently, over 6,000 students are studying on UHI courses or undertaking postgraduate research.

The Highlands & Islands of Scotland has a population of nearly 500,000 and covers an area of over 400,000km2, which is more than half of the area of Scotland. It includes over 100 inhabited islands. Until the advent of UHI the region had no higher education student communities or campuses. A major decision was taken in 1992 by Highland Regional Council and the Highlands & Islands Enterprise agency to support the development of a dispersed higher education institution to further academic and economic development throughout the Highlands & Islands. Thus the University of the Highlands & Islands Project was born, which was enhanced in 1997 by a £33.35m grant from the Millennium Commission.

UHI’s undergraduate and taught postgraduate degrees are currently validated by OUVS and the Universities of Strathclyde and Aberdeen; research postgraduate programmes lead to awards from the OU and the University of Aberdeen. The UHI mission is to play a pivotal role in the educational, economic, social and cultural development of this vast, sparsely populated region of the UK through the establishment of a University of the Highlands & Islands. In September 2005 the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) approved UHI’s application for taught degree awarding powers, and has now completed the scrutiny process. This is a significant step towards achieving university title, which is hoped for within the next few years.

Linked by technology
UHI students, lecturers, academic partners and learning centres are part of an advanced high-speed electronic network. More than £75m has been invested in technology to provide state-of-the-art access to teaching and facilities throughout the region. But UHI is in no way a ‘virtual’ institution; academic partners and learning centres have real buildings, staffed by real people and located in real places. Students normally study at an Academic Partner or learning centre, using online learning materials, with lectures, tutorials and seminars taking place individually or in small groups via video-conferencing. There will also be access to locally based study resources and support. This mix of blended learning is essential to ensure a high standard of education for students who live in remote and rural communities.

In many respects, UHI is just like any other higher education institution or university, offering undergraduate and postgraduate courses and research opportunities. However, UHI is a pioneering and thoroughly modern organisation which is changing the way higher education is delivered. UHI is an early adopter of Shibboleth (replacing Athens) authentication, and is rolling out thin client (Citrix) technology across the partnership to replace desktop PCs. Recognised as being at the forefront of harnessing new technologies for teaching and research provision, UHI is increasingly being seen by other countries around the globe as a role model for the delivery of distributed learning.

Videoconferencing is a critical part of the advanced communications and technology strategy used throughout UHI for learning, teaching and administration. Currently there are over 150 VC units throughout the Academic Partners and Learning Centres. The VC master, based in Shetland, remotely manages more than 2200 multi-site conferences per year, as well as many locally inspired point-to-point calls. This makes UHI one of the biggest users of videoconferencing in the UK.

Learning & Information Services
The UHI Library Service is part of the larger Learning & Information Services Department (LIS) which is also responsible for UHI’s IT services, networking, video conference facilities, learning resources, support for web-based learning and virtual learning environments. The UHI Librarian is a member of the LIS management team, along with the heads of e-networks, e-learning, strategy & development, operations and customer services. The Director of LIS is one of UHI’s executive management team.

As with registry and academic quality functions, UHI LIS services are provided across the whole academic partnership, and are based on the principles of providing an equitable and high quality student experience. There is shared responsibility between staff in executive office and academic partners for the provision of services. Front-line support for library and computing services is provided by, and at, academic partners while the infrastructure and range of common services are provided out of UHI executive office. In the case of library services this includes the management of the library system and electronic resource management.

The UHI Library Team
Over the past few years UHI library service development has been via collaboration between the librarians of the academic partners (the UHI library team). The team has established common protocols and practices across the partnership, most particularly in relation to resource sharing. UHI library team members are employees of their own academic partner, not of UHI, and often have local responsibilities in addition to their contribution to supporting higher education courses delivered across the UHI partnership. The UHI library team is regarded as an exemplar model of UHI network working by academic partners in helping to create the University of the Highlands & Islands.

The need to maintain close links between resource support and academic programme delivery and development is recognised as vital and, as a result, each of UHI’s subject networks has as a member one of the UHI library team assigned to it to provide support and advice. Subject networks can be equated to a department in a traditional university and there are currently 15 subject networks across UHI’s four faculties. Inclusion of a member of the UHI library team on each subject network allows for two-way communications regarding resources and services and improves reading list access and resource provision.

During 2004 a review of LIS was conducted by a panel of external experts and, along with considerations of value-for-money, the panel addressed the issue of whether the service was of an appropriate range and configuration for an intending university. One of the recommendations was that a greater resource needed to be applied to the leadership and coordination of library services. The post of UHI librarian was then created and advertised.

Development of the UHI LIS Library Service
As part of its commitment to better resourcing the central management of the library service, UHI allocated considerable funding for the development of e-provision. Elizabeth McHugh, previously librarian at Shetland College, is the E-Resource Manager and is charged with ensuring that the collection of e-resources is developed to meet the needs of academic provision. An e-resource policy is currently being drafted, with the aim of ensuring that the funds available for electronic resources are deployed in an effective, equitable and accessible manner across the partnership.

The centrally funded team, which also includes Catherine Saele, the Library Systems Manager, provides support, guidance and policy direction for the wider UHI library team. UHI staff do not need to be based in the Executive Office in Inverness, but can be housed in one of the Academic Partners. Catherine is based in Shetland, Elizabeth in Dingwall and I travel around the network and beyond for on average half of the working week, so communication methods, as well as email and texting, include Skype, Netmeeting, instant messaging, video-conferencing.

In the distributed federated higher education environment that is UHI, certain service delivery concepts become fundamental to library strategic planning, such as equivalence of service provision, seamless access to resources and integration into the blended learning environments.

To help achieve these aims and to provide seamless resource discovery for the UHI community, access to library resources is being built into UHI’s new VLE. Called CLAN (Collaborative Learning Academic Network), based on Bodington open source architecture and developed by UHI software engineers in conjunction with the Universities of Oxford and Leeds, CLAN is replacing WebCT and Blackboard and will be the vehicle for all UHI teaching and learning.

The future
With responsibility for developing the UHI library service strategy and ensuring the creation of policies to build a university level library service, the future from my perspective is breathtaking.

I give a high priority to developing collaborative services: not only from the perspective of building on current intra-UHI collaboration to ensure common and comparable service standards across the UHI partnership, but also from the perspective of collaboration with other library services and agencies in Scotland. Fruitful discussions have already taken place with the Centre for Digital Library Research in Strathclyde University, the National Library of Scotland, the Highland Health Sciences Library, SEPA and some of the public library services in the areas in which UHI has a presence.

As well as further development and integration of library resources with CLAN and the digital repository development (outlined above) and closer involvement with e-learning and learning environment strategies, an improved library management system has been selected, to allow greater interoperability in resource sharing, and enriched content to allow better searching.

Ultimately, as UHI matures and, hopefully, develops into a university, complex issues around UHI vs. Academic Partner library funding, collection development and resource models will need to be addressed. The future looks very exciting indeed.

Gillian Anderson has been Librarian of the UHI Millennium Institute since August 2005. She was latterly Director of User Services at the University of East Anglia and the Head of Lending at the University of Wales Bangor from 1993-2004.

Information Scotland Vol. 4(6) December 2006

Information Scotland is delivered online by the SAPIENS electronic publishing service based at the Centre for Digital Library Research. SLAINTE (Scottish libraries across the Internet) offers further information about librarianship and information management in Scotland.