 Thank you very much indeed. I'm sure you will share my disappointment in many ways that we're not hearing from Lael today. What I tried to do is reflect on her work and just think a little bit about the value of our collections and what they mean. I was struck yesterday by a number of presentations that challenged the role of the librarian or the archivist as being quite passive of safeguarding and protecting, which obviously is an important part of what we do. But I was struck by the University of the Arts' plan to look at their institutional memory and make a positive change, a positive statement around what sort of memories they should be collecting to make it far more inclusive and diverse. Archivist as activist is a very interesting concept and in many ways that was where I was looking forward to hearing Lael's work around how she's worked with students and protesters. At Centre House we have a fantastically rich collection of protest material, often the sort of ephemera that never actually makes it in elsewhere. Flyers handed out on marches, including, I should add, many of our own students who are quite agitated about outsourced workers. I'm sure many of you have shared such protests. We've had a series of occupations, one of which earlier this year resulted in a series of startled emails being sent out by senior officers who worked on the lower ground floor, culminating one which will long stick in my memory, which claimed that the students had breached the photocopier barricades and starved for making a hasty exit. Not quite Le Miserable, but a very interesting insight that perhaps may not make it into the institutional archive, but perhaps also should. But I was struck also by the passion that both Lael and everyone who's presented so far has around collections and archives. I'm not a librarian, I'm not an archivist, but equally I appreciate and value the collections that I have worked on in the past as a historian. Particularly as I've moved from the academy into the realm of public history, and this is where I have another one of those weird hats. I'm an honorary associate professor of public engagement at the University of Nottingham. I have interpreted that as an ability to poke my nose into all sorts of ways history can and should have an impact, a transformative impact on elements of society, but they're all drawn from collections of one sort or another. Collections that have actually been acquired and gathered together in institutions, but also a different sort of material, particularly as we move into the digital age, one of the great revolutions in human history. The others being the creation of writing from ancient times, the other being the creation of the printing press, and now of course the way we communicate and gather material in a digital environment. So for me it's a very interesting connection between the role I now have working in higher education, and in many ways a desire to make the material far more accessible to a wider audience. What I want to do is talk a little bit around what we're challenging ourselves to redefine our collections for. So for those who don't know about Senate House, I just want to explain a little bit about some of the things that we're planning to do over the next few years. Various elements that are relevant to the research library community, but I want to extend that to all sorts of archives. In the public arena, but also the growing number of community archives that are from the bottom up. As we've heard yesterday, the intersection between personal and user generated content and that that is gathered together in an official repository. I will then give you a few case studies about how impact and engagement is shifting and how we as a research community can actually start to drive real societal transformation and impact using our collections and possibly even reflecting on some of the things we've heard yesterday to bring new collections in, to be more agile in the way that we are challenged and challenge higher education to have value and meaning beyond the academy. And then I'll just throw out a few possible conversation starters, a provocation about some of the challenges certainly that the research library sector face, Plan S, Open for example. So let's start with Senate House Library. Traditionally this is where I should say that we have two million items, two million books although we now find after a very intense summer of RFID tagging that we have precisely 547,352 items on open access. We also have 50 named special collections and 1,800 archives. Some of them very small, no more than a few files but increasingly some fairly substantial collections that we are gathering in a different way. Starting first of all with the more traditional collection building. We've challenged ourselves to just think a little bit about what people need from this material. We focused first of all on our special collections and just tried to have a look at what our core research strengths are. We were in Arts and Humanities Library with a large remit for social sciences as well. And yet we've found that once we've gathered the material together there are some very interesting areas that we now want to collect because they far more reflect the sort of uses that our students are telling us they want from them. To the end that we've now started to launch research fellowships that we will fund with carte blanche to explore collections in an untrammeled way. Of course we want research outputs but it's much about engagement and flagging up future use of that material as it is about the traditional monograph or short form article. But I think something that's become very apparent is that collectively as a federal university with all the various colleges and we act as their second library there was a really great opportunity to do things and amplify our collections. With our special collections in mind we've formed a special collections forum and we've identified 31 unique core research strengths across the group and now we're working to try and find ways of moving our students around the collective far more effectively and once again amplifying the value of those collections which in isolation are very good and very important and of national significance but actually as a collective have far more depth and breadth and we're starting to translate that into how we manage our new acquisitions as well referring to the work of the White Rose consortium and particularly some of Stella Butler's categorisations and evaluations of material and also taking note of what the London School of Economic and Political Science have done we are starting to see if we can also work together to share some of our legacy material the stuff that is low use but is still often on open access so that if we share storage and share access we can expand our collective range of material whilst producing our individual cost base and one of the most transformative ways of doing this is being by working at a national level with some of the major infrastructure projects at the National Bibliographic Knowledge Base run by JISC we think that there is real mileage in taking this forward as part of a national monograph strategy it needs to be underpinned by commonality of storage that retention of the last copies of fundamental importance the British Library obviously have a very important role to play but what we're beginning to see is that the local value is important as well I think for many of us who read the White Rose report commissioned by JISC we were quite stunned by the fragility of their comparative collections and that actually there isn't as much overlap as we thought so the value of these collections as an aggregate is actually far greater and we can work together to try and promote and expand access that has to take place with collaboration we as an RLU community should be leading this conversation with our colleagues in Sconell this is our opportunity but we need to start doing that at a local level as well so we've challenged ourselves to look at our collection building in a traditional way and then start to work in partnership far more effectively but this comes back to my point about value and it's all very well building collections if no one uses them and this is where we're starting to redefine the role of the Higher Education Library the University of London was founded in 1836 to promote higher education to as wide an audience as possible irrespective of race, colour, creed or social status and those visions and values are still relevant today if not more so given some of the global challenges we all face we see the library as the vehicle for driving that process forward because we are the natural and trusted heritage partner that will allow the academy to reach out to other parts of the community this is the first I guess of those provocations this is something that we talk about and I'll come back to this point a bit later the difference between outreach and engagement and impact quite often we find that when we do reach out to communities no one knows we're there which for us is quite astonishing because we literally are the ivory tower in the middle of Bloomsbury you tend not to be able to miss this as either us or the post office tower whatever it's called these days down the Euston Road yet we're totally irrelevant to most people who live in the area and that really goes against our founding vision and values we want to be able to show that what happens in the academy has real impact in the local communities we want to encourage more people from those backgrounds in traditionally poorer parts of London to see a relevance for higher education not just the institution, not just the buildings but the research and this means redefining our relationship between the communities and also in many ways with some of the academic leads it is about value, it is about relevance and as a trusted public organisation such as a library we are the means of negotiating that relationship this comes back to again some very interesting concepts around space and the fact that we're beginning to see trends that even with remote access to e-resource productivity is enhanced, it's amplified when students come into the library space there is an expectation that you will produce more by being in close proximity to both collections and also other researchers which sometimes you don't necessarily do at home possibly because it's much easier to watch, tell you or get a cup of coffee we are one of those libraries that have no food or drink anywhere but the general academic sense of performing something of value happens in that space and for those with campus libraries of course you will now see that that hub is at the heart of student life as we move into areas of wellbeing so the role of engagement is of fundamental importance we tried this on a couple of projects we rebooted our engagement campaign in 2016 where we reflected the anniversary of Shakespeare's death and put on a major for us exhibition it wasn't the usual sort of material behind glass we wanted to reflect the broad appeal of Shakespeare through performance, through music, through spoken word as well as the traditional lecture programme and this brought whole new communities into the library for the first time seeing it as a space where they could both reflect upon and challenge the academic output and we worked with local groups, the Cardinal Newman Centre with people who were coming to this country as refugees and had their own idea of what their Shakespeare might be from the cultures that they brought with them and using the library as that sort of creative crucible we had some fascinating encounters where many of our academic colleagues went away seriously reconsidering the impact Shakespeare had had as a global literary figure beyond the narrow confines of editorial tradition which was our original purpose since then we've gone on to broaden out many of our themes but also look at how they first and foremost reflect on public engagement the season before last we ran a series of activities and an exhibition looking at queer between the covers representations of LGBT plus communities in literature but bringing it right up to date working with Gaze the Word, a local bookshop that had been raided in the 1980s and as a result we found that we had more people coming in than ever before who had never set foot in the building and were not affiliated to an academic institution and as a result we are now looking to actively acquire and build our collections in this area so that's the agility, reflecting issues and challenging the narrative of our institution reflecting back on those original core values at the moment we're looking at rights for women this is part of a year long campaign led by the university reflecting on some of the anniversaries we heard about yesterday but also just looking forward about how we can address the pay gap for example better representation in our institution so we're using our collections to look at public engagement and then challenge the way the organisation runs now this is a theme I want to come back to but I also want to go a little bit deeper and explore the impact of collections at a very personal level and I just want to run through a few case studies of examples where collections linked to community projects have challenged what we mean by value value is often linked to some sort of financial transaction if we spend x then we will get y out of the other end but many of these projects don't actually look at value that way it's much more of a qualitative assessment which often gets excluded when we talk around impact the first is a post who do you think you are project in Caughton Vale which is in Stirlingshire and it's a women's prison this goes back about 10-12 years and having watched who do you think you are and this whole emotional journey many people in the prison service thought well there's something here around trying to connect with one's roots to see if we can do something about present and future and they invited in the local library service who teamed up with the archives to run a short course for inmates who were coming up for parole alongside traditional vocational courses and other preparations for reintegration back into civilian life it was for various obvious reasons conducted mainly online and on site and people would come in and help those who'd signed up just explore some of their background going back through research into ancestors that many of them connected with found them inspiring characters and many others found that there was a particular vocation that threaded through their family that allowed them then to pick up vocational training that they wanted them to follow up on the other side now when you compared the rates of reoffending from this intervention versus the standard the standard was pretty much national average but using this intervention we brought that down not quite to zero but as close as you can get we found that many of those who'd been through this program had seen it as an opportunity to transform their lives they were inspired by the past and they aspired to a better future they wanted to be that aspirational character rather than the who do you think you are black sheep with the family that we traditionally come across it was really empowering and it was genuinely transformative so what was the value some of these examples I'll ask you to think about what was the value the value was that we have changed people's lives how do you quantify that? well this is where the argument often moves to sort of an offsetting line of discussion if we hadn't and that number had reoffended then there is the on-costs of arrests and trial and increasing the prison population so that in many ways was the quantitative evidence to provide what was the alternative cost if we hadn't have done this and so I'll come back to this point again it's just thinking around the language of value that we need to use when justifying projects such as this yes transformative for individuals but that money if it had been spent elsewhere would not have had that knock on effect into the wider economy the next project is called making history and there's a bit of a backstory to this one it was set up by the actor Colin McFarlane who came from an Afro-Caribbean background and he had always been a little bit disappointed with the way history had been portrayed at school because he said there was no one from his background that he could identify with or associate with it was the traditional kings, queens, aristocrats, politicians usually white, male, very noticeable of who's talking to you now and it was a real discovery when he worked out that one of the first people to get to the North Pole came from the same background as he did and that encouraged him to investigate this character which he turned into a play and in doing so he just fell in love with the process of research as I'm sure many of us have done as well and he wanted to explore his own roots and once again he found that there were barriers barriers in the records being online or rather not being online but that then got him talking talking to his family, talking to communities back out into the Caribbean and therefore his style of research was a different sort to the traditional family history connectivity family tree how far back can you go it was enriched because it was experiential and he was finding personal archives that would not be anywhere else, they were unique and so he found that his research skills had improved but most importantly his kids were fascinated by his journey and he thought what if, it's one of those great what if moments what if I could take this into schools now there's always been a barrier about doing family history in schools partly around access partly because many people's backgrounds are challenging, are difficult fostering, adoption, potential abuse and equally as Collin had found with his traditional white Anglo-Saxon genealogy simply doesn't work for most people who come from a different background but his approach was very different it was much more about storytelling and oral history that personal level and building a different sort of archive that was relevant to the individual and their story and through the help of his celebs showbiz network he managed to get the project off the ground in Lincoln and in a few London boroughs particularly those with a very diverse ethnic background often reflecting second or third generation migrants from the first generation refugees who shared a plot of land or a classroom but very little else the project was conceived partly as historical investigation but also about skills and coming from a media background he wanted the students who were involved not just to research but also to capture their memories to build a new form of video digital archive and again using various strings that he had he got Apple involved and we got MyHeritage to upload some of the content and finally he managed to persuade the BFI the British Film Institute to hold a scarler screening for all of the successful projects and we were astonished by the impact this had on those individual lives I could give you various case studies but I want to focus on one in particular and this was a student called Declan who was one of the Lincoln cohorts and he didn't know an awful lot about his background he was at school, he was in sixth form but he didn't really know why he was bored, he didn't really engage with the formal tutoring and training that he was receiving and he was going to drop out and do whatever Declan got involved in this programme because he thought it might be a bit of fun he wanted to learn about the filmmaking but he quickly realised there was a really interesting story there he didn't realise first of all that he came from an Irish background and that was only because he talked to his father who had brought him up in Lincolnshire who never really spoke about his past and then the story started to unfold In the 1970s Declan's grandfather had been in London Derry working in a pub and one of his friends had said good night and walked outside as a car drove by and shot him dead and so Declan's grandfather thought this is not necessarily the safest place to bring up a young child and with his wife packed up all of his belongings into a car and drove to the port and then came over to Liverpool and then carried on driving to distant relatives in Lincoln and then started a new life and that was where he brought up Declan's father and so on and so forth so that whole heritage had been effectively dropped not talked about, a hidden past and Declan just sat down and interviewed his father who then started to share this an incredible amount of swearing for a school project and he had to edit out for the final screening for some of the younger ears to sanitise it but it was a really earthy and emotive discussion and most remarkably of all Declan persuaded his father to go back to London Derry for the first time since it had been taken out as a child in the 70s and he made a film about this journey the journey back to Ireland a journey of exploration into the troubles and what it actually meant and then he overlaid it with local Irish folk music it was one of the most moving but insightful films about Northern Ireland that I've ever seen by a young filmmaker exploring his past it just got under your skin it was visceral, it was real, it was relevant for all of those reasons and when the screening finished and the lights came up, you could see people just dabbing their eyes and he'd choked sob it was really moving, incredibly so the impact there is that Declan decided that actually this was something he wanted to do and he applied to university and he got in doing history and media studies this was a local university he went to Lincoln and they'd been involved with many of their students supporting the school children with their work and I think this goes to the heart of what many of us are trying to achieve with our collections and our universities community engagement so a kid who probably would have never encountered higher education was brought in as now feeding back into that community knowledge so where's the value there, well that's why my life turned round but as a technique as a way of reaching out and giving relevance we now have a series of moments of history which are user generated which in many ways historians can now look at and reflect upon the need that historical oversight but it adds value it adds insight to the bigger picture this works for all sorts of communities and this project here was called touching the past run by community futures in Kent and it was a group of people with disabilities who were often labelled by physical appearance by others so their identity, their narrative was defined by someone else and the project was formed mainly as an attempt to try and give people back their narrative give people back their voice again it's one of the most moving projects I've ever been involved with we once again used elements of light touch genealogy to explore the past and again just like we saw in Cork and Vale many of the individuals had found that there was a talent hidden in the background that they wanted to explore and so they were part of a creative group who were exploring art and then just building badges I am an artist I am a musician but the thing that brought the project to life was that we housed this in the local library which was linked to the museum collection and the curators in the museum were really keen to explore how some of the storylines had been affected and were linked to the objects behind glass and they very bravely allowed the glass to be removed and the stuff came out and the tactile connection again was transformative obviously it would pass around there was subjective discussion and again it brought people to a very different place of understanding the final presentation again was quite extraordinary it wasn't the traditional presenter's audience but people were mingling around and talking and hugging and it was really affirming it was about humanity and it touched and transformed the light of those who took part again value at a personal level huge insight confidence, self-determined identity and narrative the people who have been part of the group have now formed their own group to help expand what they do and bring others in so it has become self-supporting with a very small grant the volunteer network has expanded and continues to succeed the last example I want to talk about is around how a group gathered a collection together in response to a particular societal challenge and this relates to the RIDE social heritage group now the local cemetery in RIDE was being vandalised by kids who really had nothing else to do and then were asked to go defacing and kicking over the headstones and a group got together and thought well before they all go let's transcribe the information so we have a record the standard monumental inscription style project and they secured a very small grant from the local council of £2,000 to do this work just enough to get the volunteer army mobilised and then to put the information on a website but they did a very interesting thing they self-published they didn't go down the data sale route to an ancestry of my past they just wanted a small community resource with some explanation around what they were doing and why and this was uploaded and then a very strange thing happened the olive white is very busy in festival season in summer as a destination but it goes very quiet in the autumn and winter but after the website had gone up people started coming to RIDE they were coming from the website to visit the graves of their ancestors and as a result there was a knock on impact to the local economy hotels took more bookings restaurants took more reservations the fairies were slightly fuller this whole idea of the microeconomic impact adding value came out of this heritage project and that allowed the council then to look afresh at what was going on with this small resource and with quite a lot of arm twisting and this was probably round about the time of the financial crash or probably just before they parted with a further £60,000 to renovate the chapels in the graveyard and handed one of them over to the local group which allowed them to create a base which they rather cleverly turned into a graveyard classroom and they encouraged all the classes to come in and spend some time now what kid would not want to go to a graveyard classroom rather than spend time in the traditional sense being taught and it just disrupted the learning experience quite incredibly they were taught all sorts of curriculum areas not just about history at a very local linked into a national level but a range of different skills numeracy for example going through the old pool or account books and my stuff didn't always add up using it as a base for creative writing looking at the graveyard as a resource walking rounds doing art classes nature trails there was one fallen slab under which a family of slow worms lived and it was lifted up every now and again and it slither off poor things it really animated the community it became a hub and as a result vandalism stopped but more importantly there were new converts they were caught young into the passion of this style of history history once again was relevant but also community was relevant as well and many of the students then volunteered to go into care homes to capture the memories of the older generations to feed into the community archive lots of material was on earth from families who would normally have thrown the stuff away that started to aggregate around this core resource 10 years this project lasted to the point where it won the community archives and heritage group archive of the year a few years back because of the inspirational impact it had so again value £62,000 cash injection over 10 years but suddenly you transformed the way education works you produced vandalism you've increased ancestral tourism and you've got a fantastic web resource to boot so it does show that these sorts of engagements work very well so let's bring this back to where we are as a research library and archive community and one of the key things that I've hopefully tried to illustrate there is that value doesn't always have to be financial transactional we obviously need to provide qualitative evidence how many people come through the door how many people visit our websites the stats are key in securing our funding and we know how tough a funding climate it is but I think the qualitative evidence and the language with which we present it is as important particularly if we are going to look at the value of research pounds going back out and making meaningful impact in our communities if we are going to build our collections in a certain way the need to justify beyond and amplify the output of the academic mission this is where certainly in the arts and humanities the adoption of plan S and open access open publication is very interesting disruption and one of the areas that we started to kick around at meeting with colleagues from the Netherlands at Leiden last week was again one of those what if conversations we as information professionals gather a huge amount of data what if we started to make that data work in a more connected and smart way could we add value back into this conversation as we wrestle with the challenges of plan S and open access how do we link up TEF and REF Leiden is in a pretty unique position because we don't have a head count essentially of undergrads we run worldwide distant courses we have the school of advanced study which has a national remit for research promotion and facilitation so in that sense they are free from the ref so we can actually start to look at these questions of value in a very different way we are compelled to one of the things we started to look at was quality and the fact that we are in a market whereby quality is often linked to the journal title where information, where content is submitted or the publisher that puts the monograph out there I don't know whether you saw there was a very interesting challenge to some of the funding models that work around that by Politeia again last week John Marrenbon challenged the value of AHRC to the ref in its entirety because it produced too much information it didn't free scholars up to do more interesting things particularly the grand work some of it I personally don't quite agree with but it was a very interesting provocation particularly around the role of the library providing value for this we are at the heart of that knowledge economy and if we just work ahead a little bit is there the potential to link TEF and REF to the use and reuse of output I think output again can be defined in different ways it comes back to that core point I was making around a lot of output being locked into the academy even with open access there are still other barriers the barriers of language, technical jargon and dissemination it doesn't necessarily reach those who are directly or indirectly funding it but what if we use some of this open access into courses and can track back the quality through the results of that course have the students benefited from using and reusing that open access material we are at the heart of that data capture what if research output was used and reused to have knock on impact this is where outreach engagement and impact becomes so important is reassessing the value of the academy on the communities in which they stand with the library or the archive as the way of brokering that new relationship so that creative output may well be an OA monograph or an article but if that's then used and reused to then stimulate an academic project which has further knock on effect with the community can we then track that as well and see whether that is a sign of quality I think we're uniquely placed to disrupt many of these conversations as a form of new model what we're trying to do at senate house is challenge that role of what the library could or should be there's a huge conversation around space going back to the points I made earlier about students having that expectation to create we want to look at the role of a library not just as a creative crucible for the students but a real engagement area a real way of assessing and reflecting impact with the communities in which we stand bringing in more groups as a community space where they can challenge or throw ideas back into the research creators linking it for example with local businesses SMEs many of whom bring a different skill set and unlock the entrepreneurial spark in our student communities and there's some examples where that has worked already in the University of London the library and the archive are fundamentally dependent on the collections that we bring in and build but it's only when we start to amplify their value that I think we can start to be seen to be truly transformational thank you very much