The SCONUL Winter Conference (7 December 2012 – London) was provocatively entitled ‘New Teams for a New Era’. That’s a very relevant headline for the LMS Change project, which is concerned about the skills implicated in new generations of library management systems, in pressures for enterprise scale integration and in interaction with the wider information landscape and its service platforms. So here is a relevant snapshot of the debate at the conference …

This post was jointly authored by Oliver Pritchard (Asst Director for Student & Learning Support at the University of Sunderland) and by David Kay (LMS Change project). Whilst touching on themes explored more widely in the conference, it draws principally on the discussion that took place in the ‘Boundaries of the Library’ workshop.

Core Questions?

The workshop identified some headline discussion points which given time constraints and the wide ranging nature of the discussion, were not all addressed in detail. However there was considerable value in charting them to aid future thinking and discussion.

• Identifying trends affecting skills, currently and prospectively on the horizon
• Mapping the landscape of our services (supply and demand, within the institution and beyond)
• Understanding who has a stake in ownership / operation of our services, and in particular whether these services are local to the library / elsewhere in the institution / outsourced / shared
• Ascertaining whether it makes sense anymore to talk about ‘library’ skills – and, if so, defining the distinguishing characteristics and articulating the reinforcing advocacy
• Consequently defining where / what are the skills gaps – recognising that whilst these may be technical (driven by the pervasiveness and cadence of technology change), there may be other ways of addressing this problem space, even when focused on library systems

A free flowing discussion challenged the framework for the workshop and moved to identify and address broader, but valuable themes.

Trends – What are the key trends that might determine or influence our landscape?

A wide-ranging discussion centred on two key examples:

• Outsourcing: by example – distributed and hosted services, services direct to the user, beyond our management or control (e.g. Google search; MOOCs), services with user input and choice including “crowdsourcing” (e.g. Patron Driven Acquisition; recommenders and networks such as Mendeley). This trend may broadly be described as “disintermediation” to capture that varied and distributed model of service type and delivery. The group concluded that there were in fact, probably, degrees of disintermediation at play, though not yet complete or wholesale and rarely beyond the reference frame of the library in terms of mission and skills.

• Student Experience: the learning journey was identified as a key driver and one in which libraries played a central part and could be/are key influencers and stakeholders. There was some debate regarding validity of adopting a customer/consumer/retail model, based on differing views on the nature of the student/learning transaction and whether this was truly a consumer model. However, there was some agreement that more thought should perhaps be given to the needs of our service users, and the means of listening to their voice and understanding their preferences and behaviours.

Skills – What are the skills that our services need to manage a changing landscape?

There was broad agreement that, in terms of critical success factors, these crystallised around a set of attitudinal and behavioural attributes, typically borne of a core responsibly for the mediation of information working with a considerable range of users in a variety of settings and involving the creation of critical links with a wide variety of internal and external stakeholders. A set of key attributes emerged from the tenor of this discussion:

• Brokerage
• Facilitation
• Mediation
• Agency
• Collaboration
• Bringing order to innovation and opportunism

These were identified as key ways of working which place the library team in an important position in the institution vis a vis both ‘customer’ service and corporate enablement. These were therefore expressed as differentiating characteristics for the library service that needed to be imbued in our leadership and in the approaches adopted by our teams.

This offered an important perspective on technical skills (perhaps a wrongly assumed focus of this debate). Whilst such skills were seen as significant to service success and corporate agility, it was suggested that technical skills will always change (sometimes rapidly – consider such as web frameworks, metadata transport formats) and might be bought in rather than as a default developed “in-house”.

In conclusion – A 2020 vision?

Let us assume, perhaps within the decade, that the primacy of buildings is ultimately challenged by the potential to distribute and personalise learning at scale and that print collections become largely specialist legacy concerns. In such a landscape characterised by the greater distribution of learning and support services, what knowledge and skills will remain as relevant, as core and potentially as premium for our library-like services?

It was argued that the skills characterised in our discussion – a set of complex attributes, higher level skills intertwined with core professional values – can help optimise our opportunity to survive in and crucially to shape an increasingly uncertain and fast changing world of teaching, learning and research. In the context of these fundamental observations about the ‘library team’ in a new era, the enabling technology skills required to manage and evolve library services were understood to be crucially important, almost a given, to be identified and developed as a part of core business.

Highlights, lowlights and what next
Guest Blogger: Sharon Penfold, Bloomsbury LMS Project Manager (Project website: http://www.blms.ac.uk/)
Report from BIC’s Battle of the Library Systems, 28 November 2012 

The House Motion: “Open source is about distributed innovation and will become the dominant way of producing software”

Over 40 delegates were presented with a well-paced set of cases for and against using open source software.

There were no surprises, and this wasn’t so much a battle as a mostly civilised debate. Overall, excellent points were made by all parties, and all appeared to have fair floorspace.

The open team was fundamentally higher education related; the proprietary team fundamentally public library. A more equal balance of academic and public, open source and proprietary will be needed to robustly explore the themes raised – but I suspect would add little new at a high level apart from equal representation.

As more of the content is covered elsewhere, I would just like to highlight a few more strategic aspects – and flag the question, what next?

Public libraries v Higher Education

An interesting division condensed during the ‘Battle’ – nothing to do with technology, everything to do with public library and council culture compared with that of higher education.

Public libraries were presented on the proprietary side as truly driven by risk avoidance and the legal safety net of Service Level Agreements and contracts.

A culture of innovation and responsiveness in higher education was the strongest theme on the open source front.

Does this imply a very simple market shift so that providers and suppliers most sensitive to public library drivers make the most of their market strengths there – and similarly for higher education?

Badges and solutions

A particularly constructive proprietary angle came from Jim Burton of Axiell, emphasising that the important decisions should be made based on the system doing what you want and meeting your needs – not on badges of open source or otherwise.

At the other end of the scale on the proprietary side was the illustrated limerick “William McGee and the car built for free”. This likened OSS to the result of a bunch of enthusiasts building a car, so ending up with a multi-coloured ad-hoc monstrosity.

Said limerick however did highlight an important point. Development of open source systems does require robust underpinnings to mitigate the risk that it traditionally brings.

Risk

However, where proprietary suppliers are concerned, the risk argument is a double edged sword.

Building their customer base purely on fear, uncertainty and doubt aligned with extreme risk mitigation is not a 21^st century partnership way of working.

It’s certainly not a 21^st century higher education way of working.

It’s even less about the driver that really matters in universities in the current climate – student experience.

Successful risk management is understanding the appetite of the organisation in the first place, and working within that strategic and operational context.

Where next?

Simplistically, confusion reigns at present. Votes before and after the battle were significantly split between for, against and undecided. Many would have spoiled their ballot papers in their uncertainty. They are not remotely alone.

Constructive and balanced approaches to selecting fit for purpose solutions will be needed to support the organisations seeking next generation library technology. Proprietary or open source in that context is irrelevant.

For a wider viewpoint, recommended are:
Mick Fortune’s summing up: http://www.mickfortune.com/Wordpress/?p=963
Andrew Preater’s commentary: http://www.preater.com/2012/12/01/free-and-open-source-software-and-distributed-innovation/

PRESENTERS

Open Team
Nick Dimant (PTFS)
Mark Hughes (Swansea)
David Parkes (Staffordshire)
Andrew Preater (Senate House)

Proprietary Team
Will Blackburn (Civica)
Jim Burton (Axiell)
Paula Keogh (Capita)
Anthony Whitford (Capita)
Brad Whittle (SirsiDynix)

Facilitators
Mick Fortune (consultant)
Karina Luke (BIC)
Martin Palmer (Essex County Council)

Time passes quickly and we’re now half way through the JISC LMS Change project (july 2012 to February 2013). You’ll remember, of course, that the project is undertaking three activities that we hope (as if by magic) to bring together in the second half of the project:

• Synthesis of the landscape and associated developments in library systems and the wider world of access to scholarly information; this is being tracked in an evolving paper edited by Ken Chad of which Version 2 will be published here this month
• Identification of key findings, approaches and developments arising from the programme’s Pathfinder projects, assisted Helen Harrop’s blog posts
• Development of a ‘framework’ / ‘model’ that will help libraries to think about and plan around potential changes in library systems and associated processes – the main subject of this post

The project has active support from a Collaboration Group of eight universities (intentionally diverse in terms of mission, size and location) in steering this course – for which our thanks go to Birkbeck, Cambridge, the Open University, Stirling, Swansea, UCL, Westminster and Wolverhampton.

The eight libraries (and associated consortia such as Bloomsbury and WHELF) are currently helping us test the emerging ‘change framework’ using a simple experimental method … Each library has posed a particular systems change issue or ‘challenge’ that they are currently facing (from a complex detail to whole LMS replacement) and we’re meeting together to see whether the proposed approaches to problem scoping, solution modelling and thought provoking are helpful.

The selected issues for testing the framework have included

• Authentication challenges
• Cloud-based library system issues
• E-resource license management
• LMS implementation
• Next generation LMS points of integration
• Reading / resource List processes
• Web-scale versus local search indexes

On Wednesday 21 November, the Collaboration Group will be meeting to test the ‘framework’ with a challenge of interest to a large number of libraries – the implications for institutional library systems of adopting the KB+ shared service (http://service.kbplus.ac.uk). We’ll he joined in the discussion by Huddersfield’s HIKE project (http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/hike/ – for which KB+ is a core interest) and by JISC Collections (leading KB+ service development). Look out for our blog post on the meeting!

We’re also grateful of support from the US-based Kuali OLE consortium. Their interest is to identify thinking and planning approaches that will help any library in considering large scale systems change (http://kualiole.tumblr.com/post/32887237076/rethinking-the-rfp). Kuali partner, the University of Chicago plans to put our approach to the test in the new year as (like the UK Bloomsbury group) they’ll be an early implementer of the Kuali OLE platform.

At the end of the JISC LMS programme meeting in Birmingham last month, Ben Showers set all the projects present the task of completing a blogpost that describes success for us.

David Kay’s blogpost on the meaning of success for the LMS Change project details the key ‘functional’ deliverables and also shares the aspiration at the core of our project:

“to define a framework for constructively assessing the ‘library service platform’ requirements of academic libraries, whether acting individually or looking to shared / above-campus services.”

Not all of the pathfinder teams have blogged their project’s definition of success yet but here’s links to the ones who have and I’ll add links to any others that get completed after I’ve published this post.

• The Anthologizr project doesn’t have a post specifically discussing what success looks like for them but one of their blogposts defines the goal of their project so clearly that I’ve taken it as a proxy success measure: “to develop a demonstrator repository system in which users can take an arbitrary selection items (text or images), and export them – ‘one-click’ style – as a viable, usable E-book anthology in EPUB format, for individual use, or for sharing with students by email or in VLEs.” They’ve also published a blogpost which outlines the simplest use case for their project which paints a very clear picture of what the Anthologizr team hope to achieve.
• The Benefits of Sharing team have defined success as being the degree to which they are able to answer the questions they have set themselves regarding the current or future possibilities of a shared LMS. The team have concluded that “the success of the project does not rely on there being a benefit to a shared LMS, but by the project being able to articulate the costs and/or benefits.”
• The E-BASS25 project team are measuring the success of their project across a range of desired outcomes which include:
  - a clear idea of the current e-books landscape in the UK
  - the issues faced when procuring e-books consortially
  - providing clear guidance on e-book acquisition to the M25 Consortium, and the wider HE academic library community, with the provision of supporting reports, briefing papers and toolkits.
• The HIKE project will be measuring their success based on whether they deliver the tangible goals of implementing and integrating the KB+ and Intota systems, evaluate both systems and make recommendations to the wider UK HE community, particularly regarding workflows. The team have also identified a less tangible measure of their success which involves guaging the cultural change required to implement systems such as Intota.
• The Shared LMS project have identified a single success measure: delivery of a robust business case for a shared LMS across Welsh HEIs. To deliver that business case they have a complex task ahead of them in establishing the key costs and benefits, particularly relating to improvements in the user experience and enhanced functionality.

In addition to our LMS Change synthesis and scoping project there are six ‘pathfinder’ projects which have also been funded as part of the JISC’s ‘Future of Library Systems’ programme. You can visit each of the other six projects’ blogs via the list on the righthandside of this blog’s homepage but I thought it would be useful to briefly introduce each of the projects.

The questions which all these projects are exploring, to a lesser or greater degree depending on the project, are:

• how feasible/beneficial is a specific shared service (e.g. e-book acquisition) for a particular consortial grouping?
• can an innovative software integration/development, which holds potential for adoption in other institutions, be successfully proven in a specific test-bed institution?

 The Anthologizr project team is developing an extension to the EPrints repository software which will allow users to generate their own ad-hoc e-anthologies of items held within open access repositories. In the course of their project Anthologizr will be developing a demonstrator application and use cases.  They are also collating an ‘anthologising’ software toolkit which already looks like a useful resource. You can contribute to the Anthologizr project by suggesting open access resources that could be included in the meta-anthology their demonstrator application will be creating.

The Benefits of Sharing project has a very clear and concise question driving their endeavours: “How would a shared library management system improve services in Scotland?” The project is exploring the potential for a regional shared LMS service by investigating three aspects (services, systems and content) and their output will feed into a new vision for shared library systems across Scottish HE libraries.

The Copac Collection Management project is founded on an existing collaboration between King’s College London and Senate House in the area of print monographs. It also builds on the work of the recently completed, Discovery-funded, Copac Collection Management Tools project. The project aims to contribute to future collection management systems by “identifying, informing and testing bibliographic metadata requirements”. The project will also see KCL and Senate House embark on a practical collaboration in collections management which could act as a blueprint for other HEIs.

The E-BASS25 (E-Book Aquisition as a Shared Service in M25) project is developing practical guidelines and tools to enable purchasing consortia to optimise their patron-driven e-book acquisition service. The scope of their project is ambitious in that it seeks to identify the challenges of consortial e-book purchasing and also draw up policy-level guidelines which will overcome those challenges.

The HIKE (Huddersfield, Intota, KnowledgeBase+ Evaluation) project will be conducting a full evaluation of the compatibility of the KnowledgeBase+ shared service e-resource platform (which is currently being developed as part of a JISC Collections project) and Serial Solutions’ Intota, a web-scale collection management service.

The Shared LMS project is a feasibility study that aims to establish the business case for a consortially shared LMS across Welsh HEIs and partner institutions. As well as investigating the overall business case, the project is looking at how adopting a shared LMS could “build on and deepen existing long-term collaboration” among Welsh academic libraries.