 Good afternoon, morning or evening, everyone, depending on where you are in the world. I'm Robin Green, Chair of Research Libraries UK, and I'd like to welcome you to the RLUK Digital Shift Forum. This is our first event in this monthly series. Thank you for joining us. The forum is one of the key deliverables from RLUK's digital shift manifesto, which was launched in May 2020 and can be found on the RLUK website. The manifesto provides a 10-year vision for the research library in relation to the digital shift occurring within its collections, operations, services and audiences. It outlines the skills, the spaces, the infrastructure and the partnerships required to achieve this vision. Since its launch, members of RLUK's digital shift working group and various member networks have been busy implementing the manifesto's delivery plan. This has included unexpected elements such as RLUK's research into COVID-19 and how this is having an impact on the digital shift. This work was published on the RLUK website in July. One of the manifesto's key ambitions is to bring together colleagues from across the information, cultural and research communities to explore the nature and impact of the digital shift occurring amongst research library collections, services and audiences. This work draws on the convening power of RLUK, combined with the Digital Shift Forum's mantra that you're seeing of convene, discuss, collaborate. We'll then ensure the fruits of this work are shared widely to stimulate further service development. So, the forum is specifically designed as a cross sector interdisciplinary and global space, a place to make connections and identify through discussion and debate tangible actions that we might take as a community. I hope you'll engage in this with us over the coming months and to persuade you to do so a few words about our forthcoming programme. We have seven excellent speakers scheduled for this series, running at pace from now until April 2021. They come across from the research, information and cultural sectors and bring perspectives from both within and beyond the research library community. And just to warn you that the format of the sessions will be presentations and discussions like today, but will also include in conversation pieces and book club formats. We want to connect with you through events that are part conference, part book club, part coffee shop chat. And next in the series on the 18th of November is Claire Warwick, Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Durham in the UK, who will speak on the digital dystopia. To sign up for this and other sessions and I thoroughly encourage you to do so, go to the Digital Shift section of the RLUK website. So on to housekeeping and a few housekeeping points for today. The session will be recorded and will later be made openly available on the RLUK website. If you've got questions on presentation, please submit these through the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. Do submit them throughout Lockham's talk. Don't feel that you've got to wait till the end. And if you want to share thoughts on Twitter, use hashtag RLUK, DSF. You can also make comments in the chat box, but please only put questions in the Q&A box. And lastly, OCLC will ask for your input during the session in the form of a short poll on your perspectives on COVID and collections. Do go to the poll and complete it when the time comes, as Lockham will discuss the results during his talk. And who could be more fitting to launch our forum and its series of thought pieces than Lockham Dempsey, OCLC vice presidents and chief strategist. Today's audience will I'm sure be very familiar with Lockham's work and the influence he's had on library development over the years. I particularly admire how he identifies and captures for us sexual large scale canvases and directions of travel. His work enables us, me, to figure out how to place the jigsaw pieces of our library services into these contexts. And he's also got an uncanny ability to encapsulate these simply and powerfully in phrases such as the inside out library and the collective collection. Phrases that then become part of our professional canon. His most recent blog post interweaves current collection directions, the COVID pandemic and the implications of the acceleration of the shift to digital that we're experiencing. And in his talk today, Lorkan will explore and extend these themes, looking at how libraries are optimizing and pluralizing their collections to meet local and wider community contexts. He'll also touch on how different at scale systemic characteristics influence developments using as an example differences between the UK and the US. So I'll now hand over to Lorkan and he'll take questions after the presentation. So do please submit these as we go through. Thank you very much Robin for that kind introduction. I'm very pleased to be here very pleased to inaugurate this series and just wish it could be in person. As Robin said, I'm going to talk about a variety of collection directions or reflections that I've been talking about for a little while, but also talk about how they have been accelerated by the pandemic, one of the impacts of the pandemic across. All that we do, I think is that many trends are accelerated. It's as if 10 years of development are suddenly happening in one year. If you think about what's happening in healthcare, if you think about what's happening in education, if you think about what's happening in retail, we're seeing this acceleration of trends that were already underway. And I think the same thing is certainly happening in libraries and it is happening in relation to some of these trends that I have been talking about. So thank you again. Very pleased to be here and I will jump in. I'm going to say very little about UK-US contract, a contract and then talk in various ways about collections as we move along. It's quite often difficult to sort of think about how one is different from somewhere else if you are inside. Stepping back and looking at it from the outside, you get quite a different perspective because you step outside your normal way of doing things. You see as it were what the label is on your own jar. But I think if you look at similarities between the UK and the US, one of the things that is quite striking is that the educational system is quite stratified in each country. If you think about comparing the US with Canada or you think about comparing the UK with Ireland or with the Netherlands on either side, you'll see that in each case the US and the UK are more stratified than their neighbours. There is a prestige ranking. There is a sense of research excellence concentrating in certain areas. So this is very much a feature of both the UK and the US higher education system and clearly you can see the way in which research funding is distributed as well following certain patterns. Obviously our UK concentrates to some extent the institutions within a UK context to have that research focus. I think over the next few years both in the US and in the UK and there is quite an active discussion in the US. The way this plays in terms of social equity given the role of education in social mobility but the extent to which the stratification is potentially supporting or not supporting social equity I think becomes a very important topic. One factor of the stratification is this specialisation, the way in which research is concentrated in particular at universities and as I say supported by the flow of funding. But that also means I think that you do see a very clear sense that you have research universities that focus on learning, student retention, student success, very important but also concentrate a lot of research activity and are very focused on research support from the point of view of the library. Really important discussion about research data management to a variety of other things but very clear specialisation there. If you think about some differences really thinking about the national context you have a high degree of centralisation in the UK as you do in a variety of European and other countries. The US is very decentralised. So thinking about a UK context you have a big focus public education so I think people in the US are occasionally surprised to discover that Oxford and Cambridge are public universities that participate in the same overall regulatory framework as all of the other universities in the UK. They are subject to the same funding and assessment regimes and you have things like the REF at a national level that has a systemic influence within the way in which things are done in a UK context. You have agencies that operate at a national level to provide services to increase capacity to increase efficiency to increase impact through some pooling of effort. You turn to a US environment and really the situation is very decentralised. You don't tend to have national level agencies in that way. You have a really hugely diverse educational system and quite a lot of decentralisation. You have a mix of public and private institutions meaning that there are different focuses there. You have quite a bit of state concentration. You have state systems, you have state support and so on. But I think that decentralisation is very much part of the future and that is one reason why consortia in a library context are so important because if you don't have that sort of shared infrastructure coming from public sources then libraries or universities come together to do things for themselves. So the consortium is really a central part of library operations in the US context and libraries will tend to belong in fact to several consortia and get a lot of their collaborative work done through consortia. Now clearly in a UK context, various other contexts, you have something of a mix but nevertheless that reliance, that importance of the centralised public provision is quite important. Now clearly just from a governance point of view, from a structural point of view is moving in a particular direction has more of a membership element but nevertheless really quite interesting to see that difference. And I think historically it's a feature of the UK that originally the British Library, especially through the document supply centre, but then also JISC has tended to mean that you haven't seen the development of those consortia in the same way because to some extent there hasn't been a need because you have that national provision. So I think really quite an important distinction when you come to talk about services and development. Okay, so I'm going to say a little bit about pandemic effects. At the moment, people are very much plunged into planning, they're very much plunged into figuring out how to open safely, how to do things in a very difficult time and certainly at OCRC we're very aware of this through our interaction with libraries and our services, but also through project realm where we have a lot of work to do. We have been working with IMLS in the US and Patel looking at the virus and persistence on materials and really immersed in the whole safety discussion. What I want to do is to say that as we look beyond the horizon, wherever the horizon is, what are two or three things that will really emerge as important drivers? Speaking of driving, this is a bridge between the US and Canada and this is a picture that I took before the pandemic, of course I couldn't make this journey now because I can't actually go to Canada. So, I'm thinking of three pandemic effects. The first is clearly the shift online and I think if we think about retail, we think about health, we're seeing this general, if we think about entertainment, we're seeing this general shift online and I think clearly things will change again, but we're not going to get all of the toothpaste back in the tube. Various changes that have happened are going to continue and we talk about a shift online, but I think what this means is that we really have to think about what does a holistic online library experience mean. It doesn't mean just moving stuff online, it means that how do you create something that reflects the full presence, the full capacity, the full offering of the library in an online environment. The second thing is mission. Really this will bring about and clearly libraries are already focused on the mission of their organization, but I think this will really double down on that in terms of creating a sharp focus on alignment with evolving institutional priorities as institutions figure out where they are going, what they are doing, what their emphasis is in this environment. Third and related to that is a big focus on optimizing. It will be an imperative to optimize against particular goals. This will be because there will be downward pressure on budget, but there will be a rolling strategy thinking about how to react, what to do, how to position in the context of a world that has changed. Also, as we have seen the awakening, the reckoning in relation to racial equity, really a strong focus on pluralizing, pluralizing libraries, pluralizing collections, pluralizing perspectives. So this has come in to the mix and very much thinking about how to optimize against particular goals. So certainly online, on mission, and then optimize. Historically within a UK context, the hybrid library was a concept that emerged 20 years ago or so in terms of thinking about that digital shift and earlier parts of the digital shift and thinking that you have a hybrid experience, you have a hybrid library that combines digital and physical. Now, with a hybrid library though, it's interesting how when we hear people talk about the library on campus or elsewhere, quite often there's this sort of confusion between the library as a building, the library as a service, the library as a set of people. And if you think about the value of the library, what value of the library provides, the identity of the library, the work flows that people engage in, all of those things in the hybrid environment tend to be a little bit blurred because people don't have that single library story that brings together the range of online services, the new capacities, as well as this still quite strong sense of the library as a physical place with books and wood in it. And I think this is a picture I took a couple of years ago of a library that many of you will be familiar with in Trinity College Dublin, now of course a tourist venue. And interestingly, if when you see a stock photograph of a library, it seems to me about 50% of the time it's this library. When US News has a picture of a library when New York Times has a picture of a library, quite often it is this library. So that sense of the image of the library is still quite strong, even though we've moved beyond it. And I think when we talk about a hybrid library, it's as if we have these signposts going to different aspects of the library. And they don't sort of come together into this holistic single story, this holistic single presence, this holistic single experience in the context of users' lives. And I think one of the ramifications of the pandemic, and especially depending on how long it lasts, is that recognition maybe of the library as a service that has an identity and a presence. And the link to the library building is severed a little bit, or the library building as part of the identity of the library clearly is there, but it's just one part of this overall library experience, which now is being experienced online. So I think that acceleration of the library into its online manifestation and the sense that it is a service in your life maybe will be accelerated. And I think this means that what we're doing, what we're looking at is how do you deliver the full library experience online. Now, you can deliver the full library experience online in terms of social spaces, various other things, but you can deliver certainly more. And there's a challenge in terms of thinking about some of the areas. So I'm not going to read all of this, but things like consultation and expertise, so much a part of the library. How do you think about that in an online environment? If you think about the very strong relational element of the library that you make relationships with people and then you begin to develop services, very important in evolving areas like research support. You build the relationships, you build the services to follow. How do you recreate that sort of relational element? And then you have more obvious or clear things like how do you deliver efficiently into the learning process, into the VLE, into learning management. Big focus in public libraries now on personal connection, looking at customer relationship management systems, looking at ways of profiling users and connecting to them. So really thinking about in an online environment, how do you deliver services certainly? And they're still a little bit clunky, we have to do work to integrate them, but then also how do you deliver the expertise of the library? How do you develop that relational element that is so important? So these things are all really going to come to the fore. And I think I put up the note about public libraries because I think that personal connection, that customer relationship management system that many public libraries have installed, those things really emphasized in this environment. So if you think about the current online presence of the library, I think what we've seen over the last while is something of a move from full collection discovery, where there was a big focus on discovery as bringing together all aspects of the collection to thinking about full library discovery. How do I make what's available in the library available? And I quite like the way Michigan has done this. If you look at this, this is their discovery service. They have this bento box arrangement, different boxes for different strands of results, and they have staff librarians in the middle. You do a search and they try and match the librarian to that search, and this is now deployed in a variety of places. But it's sort of moving along towards full library discovery, that you can search the website, you can find events, you can search resource guides, you can do various things, not just the collection. So this is, if you like, is a move in this direction, but it's only a partial move. And if you think about library websites, they still have that hybrid nature. Still, they signpost to different places, and they're pointers, they're sets of pointers, rather than this full experience. Now, I've put up a few screenshots from Michigan, because I think the Michigan Library website, which was newly developed recently, is a very good example of where things are going, of where they go. I think they've done a very good job of actually trying to develop a more holistic view of what the library has to offer and delivering it online, in a way that makes sense, in a way that doesn't signpost somewhere else and drop you off. So here's the homepage, and I think what we're seeing here in the terms that I was using a moment ago is that the hybrid library website, the library website, that's a series of signposts, that's a set of services, that's a set of opening times. It's sort of moving towards, this website gives you the full library experience, and yes, you have space here, but it tells you about that, but this is the full library experience. And we will try and present to you as much as we can everything that you can do here. So it's much fuller, it's quite deep. And the way they do things is under each section they say, so find, borrow, request, you can find on the left hand side, you have the set of headings, find materials, borrow and return, request items for a pickup, request digital copies, use course reserves. So actually quite nicely arranged the set of things that people might expect under find, borrow, request. So it's not just a link to the ILL, it's not just a link to something else. And then under each of these you can drill down further, so find materials by type, books in various formats, articles. So they're actually doing a lot more work to expand and explain what is in the library, to build context, to guide the user around. So similarly under visit and study, it's not just here are our spaces, here is when they're open. They're talking about creation and learning spaces, cafes and well-being, computing and technology, events and exhibits, floor plans. So under each of these they drill down. So what they're trying to do, as with some retail sites, but I don't think we need to look there for comparison. I think what they're doing here is saying, how do I deliver more of that library experience, more how do I create a holistic library experience? Research, help with research, so instruction and course design, creation design, digital projects and planning, data services. And then under each of these you can drill down. Now all of our library websites have some of these things, but I think what they've done here is really fill that out and it's a very nice example. Collections I think is quite interesting in the context of what I'm going to say later. They have collecting areas, so these are the areas they collect in the collection, but then they talk about their digital collections. Deep Blue repositories, they talk about their repository for preprints for research data. They talk about their publishing services and then Michigan is the home of Hashi Trust, but they signal Hashi Trust here. So again, a much more rounded view of what they do and the ability to navigate and move more deeply in about the library again, a full accounting. So I think what Michigan has done is actually show quite a nice example of a more holistic library experience online. And I think it is in fact a very interesting and well done library website, but it flags or signals how we're going to move to much more full description, much more full signposting, much more full guidance as well then as connection to expertise and over time connection back to those spaces. So I think we'll see a shift from this sort of more hybrid arrangement where you have a set of signposts to different services and so on to a much more holistic view that this is the full range of what the library does. A picture and a story of how the library helps you get your work done and pulling all of that together in a more holistic way. Now I'm conscious that we're talking about the shift to digital and I think the shift to digital happens in this context, but alongside a shift to digital, alongside greater reliance on digital services, I think the library really has to think about how does it present this holistic library service in an environment where the interaction with the library is online. Now I think this will accelerate the view that that full library experience has to be provided. On mission, I think this is clear. I put this up from Nick Hillman, a commentator on higher education, many of you will be familiar with, but he does. I just thought, when asked to expound on the full impact, it's too early to say, which is very true. Also, as he points out, we're drowned in commentary about the impact of the pandemic, what's going to happen, where are things going to go. I'm doing a bit of it now, but the message here though is that we are drowned in commentary. It is too early to say, but it is clear that institutions are going to have to sort of figure out what their focus is, how they are going to address these issues. And from a library point of view, this really means focusing on where the institution is focused. And I think this means we will see a complete transition. We will complete the transition from the more collection-based library, where some of the identity value workflow of the library was bound up with the space and the collection. And this transition obviously is well underway to seeing collections as a service. Collections are one service among many others. Collections are a way of satisfying needs, and they don't necessarily have to all reside in one place. To really thinking about how you support the learning, the research, and the engagement agenda of the institution, and depending on the type of institution, the balance between these will change. So these are all familiar to you about student success and retention, advancing research productivity. Interesting elements in terms of research infrastructure that workflow is the new content, almost thinking about how research systems, research workflow, and so on, have become much more important. One thing that I call out here is I've called it under education critical research and media discrimination. I think one thing that the library needs to do, and we're very aware of this at the moment in the US thinking about the election, is thinking about the structure of scholarship, really the complicated information environment that we're now in, where you have algorithmic systems that really are driven by algorithms, driven by preferences. We have this contested and confused sometimes media environment. We have increased polarisation and partiality that's creeping in in various ways into all aspects of our lives. So that sense of where you may once have had bibliographic instruction, which was related to the collection, moved to digital literacy, which was more broadly related, now moving to this sense of critical research or media discrimination, the ability to navigate really complex information environment. And I think that mirrors, if you like, some of the other changes in terms of the location of the library. So the third element, optimise, clearly libraries will have to optimise in terms of thinking about the online learning environment, but also a whole variety of other things. So it depends the strategic choices that need to meet particular goals of the institution. So from a library point of view, as online learning becomes more important, this means how do I increase the visibility of library resources in the VLE or the LMS? Some obvious places here. Can I make interactive resources available in the VLE, thinking about the LTI protocol and so on? Can I embed library expertise in the VLE? Can I think about space? How do I think about responsible management of space and the pandemic, telling people what is available, how to behave, what to do? And then we have a whole question about the future of shared space, but these questions obviously become very important. Also then in terms of collections, thinking about optimising collections, and you can optimise collections in a variety of ways. There's a value question, there's an open question, and certainly there's a very big issue in the RLUK agenda, various other agendas, but then there's curricular support in the context of the learning agenda. Regional or local, quite important in some contexts where there's some collaboration or there's a desire to reflect some particular issues, collaboration, and then as I say diversification, pluralising. So we thought here it might be nice to do a poll to see which of these were most important as libraries are beginning to think about optimising collections in the context of the current environment. There are trade-offs here which I'll come back to. So I'm going to pass to my colleague Merrily Ploffat who is managing the poll activity. You're muted Merrily. It just wouldn't be a webinar if somebody didn't have to unmute. So thank you so much for joining us today and for taking our poll. If you're not already there, go to polev.com slash oclc, and you can see here the poll results rolling in along those lines that Lorcan outlined. You can choose as many of these as you wish, but please choose the ones that you feel are most important for optimising collections. And we can see here there's kind of a horse race, a continuing horse race between openness and support for curriculum being the most important things for a while there. We're watching the openness clearly lead, but as more people take the poll, those things are kind of evening out. And then value for money also right up at the top. Collaborative decision-making and plural voices as experience kind of coming up as secondary concerns to those top three. A regional decision kind of coming in is for Lorcan, your comments on this? Yeah, I mean, I think this is quite interesting as Merrily points out. I mean, you've got sort of two groups, the top three and then the two coming up after that. So that's really quite interesting. We've done this within a couple of consortia within the US, and I think value for money figures much more strongly there than it has here. Openness perhaps less strongly. So I think what I take away from this is the big focus on support for learning, which I think is general. Value for money may be stronger in some cases. I think it was certainly stronger in some of the consortia we looked at. And then openness maybe, I think the strong result here reflects the very strong emphasis on open access, open science through various of the national and library and RLUK, JISC and other discussions of late, but certainly seems to be stronger than in some of the consortia that we did. I would also say I think Merrily may correct me if I'm wrong here. I think the plural voices, the diversification is perhaps not as much of an emphasis here as it was in a couple of our US consortia. I think the impact of Black Lives Matter, the impact of the whole reckoning that people recognize as overdue has been stronger than that these numbers reflect here. So I would say open is stronger here. Value for money a bit weaker and plural voices a bit weaker. If you look at a comparison, I think in general, this is probably not very surprising, does reflect the strong commitment to open. Okay, so that was interesting. Let's keep moving. So we can come back to this later if it's of interest, but I'll turn it back to you, Lorcan, thanks. Okay, thank you for that Merrily. That worked quite smoothly. Okay, so having talked a bit about pandemic effects, I'll quickly talk a bit about collections, three areas and Robin mentioned a couple of these collective collections facilitated and inside out. So we've seen very much the rise of the collective collection, increasingly organizing collections of the network or system-wide level. I keep meaning to crop that photograph on the left. I took it and I keep meaning to crop it to remove the head. I haven't done that though. So collective collection, I think we are seeing certainly in a US context some acceleration here because there's a growing recognition that the print collection is very much something that has to be managed. More collectively, maybe at a consortium level, because of the move to online, but also because of the growing recognition of the opportunity cost of those print collections in terms of space, but also just because of the efficiency wanting to do certain things with the print collection in bigger groups. We've done a lot of work on this recently. You may not be able to see, but I pulled up just a little clip from the digital shift document, and this is under collections. And I've just chopped it to show that the first three have networked collaboration or collaborative collective. So a strong focus in the digital shift on thinking about how to manage collections, especially in a digital context, but also thinking about that print collection in the context of the collective, in the context of collaboration. What this means, of course, is there's always this tension between autonomy and consolidation. You know, autonomy, individual libraries do things together themselves, and what happens in a consolidated way. Now I think this is an area where the dynamic I suggested at the beginning is very strong because in the UK context, the move to consolidation is facilitated by national infrastructures. So just collections can do work on behalf of the whole country in that consolidated national way. Some other areas, if you think about print collections, may be more difficult to move along this consolidation line. But there's always a trade off between autonomy and consolidation. What do you do locally? What do you do? What do you continue to focus on? What's important to have? This is a dynamic that is really, really very strong in consortia. Consortia have this continual discussion about what happens at the local level, what do they do at the consortia level, what, because it involves giving things, giving things up. One of the things that has emerged as an important future area is what we would have called collaborative collection development. Thinking about optimizing collections at the system level rather than at the individual library level. Prospective collection coordination is what we are calling it in certain contexts. Thinking about coordinating collections prospectively so that you can manage a particular subject or a manager. That's really very difficult to do because you have this multiple actor issue that you have to sacrifice local autonomy for shared gain. But it's very difficult to say to faculty or it's very difficult to say to people about their budget, we're going to give up some local autonomy in favour. Really quite difficult moving along the spectrum and it's one of the places where I think the national attention in the UK context is an advantage in that things can be done. There's agency at that national level. The disadvantages that things may move more slowly or stay there. Variety of questions come up then in relation to collective collections. We focus largely on print collections because of the desire to move them together. Of course we manage all sorts of collections now collectively and certainly licensed collections as I suggested a moment ago. Very consolidated in certain contexts from the point of view of negotiation and so on. Clearly we're in a pivotal moment here in scholarly communication from a licensing point of view where there are multiple paths to the future. It's quite difficult even just to track the variety of approaches, policies, positions that are there. This is a very much movement in the context of a bigger set of activities. One of the reasons it's so difficult is to some extent the academy has historically outsourced reputation management to publishers who are now increasingly consolidated in larger commercial entities. Because reputation management is so crucial to the academy, because that reliance on impact factors, citations, prestige journals, so important, very difficult to shift this and an awful lot involved in this. Publishers clearly diversifying, looking at analytics and workflow. In the discussion you see multiple competing viewpoints. Clearly from maybe a university point of view, from a funder point of view, there's a view of the system as a rational, as a system that you can maybe design, there's a rational design, it should work better, do it top down. Publishers very much see it as a market and it's subject to certain market forces, not a perfect market because of the way in which publishing works, but nevertheless we'll see things in terms of business incentives and so on. So really quite interesting seeing some of these discussions on the different interests around the table that don't always quite see where they're going. Institutional, national, international funding policy agents that play and then what is happening in the pandemic is acceleration of desire for open and open science. So all of that means that there's this very complicated discussion going on where that national coordination detention is quite helpful. From a monograph print point of view, beginning to think about what it actually means to operationalize the collective collection. So certainly in the US we're seeing quite a bit of attention to shared print, what's the optimal distribution of shared print, how do you organize groups, consortia, others to do it, coordinate digitization plans in the context of overlap, rarity and so on, and as I said a moment ago prospective collection coordination, how do you move towards sort of thinking about optimizing at the system level. As more ebooks emerge, as people license more books than issues that you're all probably very familiar with, do you develop group license to permit the sharing of ebooks, a lot more expensive, what's the balance, and a much stronger interest in evidence-based acquisition, demand-driven acquisition. And that's a sort of strange flip. We're used to historically when the collection was dominant having the collection drive discovery. And in a sort of strange way now discovery drives the collection, what people can find drives what's available to them or what's in the collection. The relationship between existing print stores, sharing of those, digitization, what you get as ebooks or not ebooks, what you acquire, what you borrow, all of this underlines the need for greater decision support. Which means that there are actually some quite naughty policy questions. If you think about collective collection from a monograph or a print point of view, what responsibility does RLUK as an entity, the RLUK members, going back to what I said about the stratification and the research element that's represented there, what responsibility do RLUK members collectively take for the print scholarly record and emerging for the published digital scholarly record, the ebooks, that might be replacing many of those print. So I think in a UK context does RLUK act, does JISC act, does whatever, British Library centrally involved, but is there a sense, is there a sense that's translated into some operational view of a responsibility for that scholarly record that, as I say, ramifies through actual choices and through systems that are put in place to ensure that. We're seeing this discussion around rights, re-evaluating, thinking about where lines are, what's permissible, control digital lending, really pushing on this in important ways and as a major discussion for individual libraries or some library organizations and I think the pandemic is accelerating that and then the same in relation to course materials and so on. As we move online, as we think about doing things differently, we're having this re-evaluation discussion and control digital lending is really pushing that as are in a different way course materials. And then the scalar question, consolidation on what level, the agency, the budget, the service, do people do things in a, why rose consortium do they do things in RLUK, do they lobby for national attention? And I think as certain questions come to the fore, then the question about agency does as well. I put this up quickly. We've done some work recently with the Big Ten Academic Alliance, large Midwestern universities, major research powerhouse, more research money in the Big Ten Academic Alliance than there are in IV Plus and University of California together. Collectively they manage about a quarter of the titles in print titles in North America. We did a report about collective collection operationalizing, collective collection, they are now trying to operationalize that. They're looking at what it means to actually bring those major print collections into shared management. So I recommend having a look at some of the material there. Facilitated collection, you want to assemble a coordinated mix of local, external and collaborative services around user needs. So we've very much moved from an owned collection to a facilitated collection. We began by borrowing things, then we licensed things, now as we say things are demand driven. Then there's a range of sharing, there was a shared print collection, shared digital collection, now we have shared scholarly outputs. And then behind all of this the fact that we're pointing to resources that are available elsewhere. We're pointing researchers at Google Scholar, including freely available ebooks, providing access to open access, open educational resources, creating resource guides. So in fact a large part of what the library does in relation to collections has moved to the facilitated end. Clearly people have large special collections, large specialized collections, large owned managed acquired collections. But there is this shift which is quite interesting. And what this means is that really the library has a new relationship to collections. At one stage there was a careful construction of a locally acquired collection. Now people want to optimally satisfy research and learning needs from a facilitated network. Open access has become more important, demand driven has become more important. Guided access to stuff elsewhere has become more important, and collaborative approaches have become more important. So all of these things prize the collection away from that, peel the collection away from being that locally acquired, carefully constructed collection, which is still a central part of what libraries do. But at the same time they're now trying to optimally satisfy research and learning needs from this facilitated network. And as I say, each of these areas is being accelerated, open access, demand driven, guided and collaborative. Inside out collection you want to create, manage and make discoverable evidence, community memory, the capacities, the resources of your institution, the research outputs, the special collections. And this has clearly become more important in a pandemic sense. Research libraries will have to more purposefully partner to curate, manage and make more discoverable research outputs like preprints and research data. As research itself is changing in as a result of a pandemic effect, acceleration of research, thinking about the peer review process, thinking about open, thinking about collaboration, really major impacts on research. It doesn't mean everything is upended. It means certain things are being accelerated. And you're all familiar with these types of services that, you know, so expert systems, expertise systems, profiling systems, discoverability of the university research outputs and expertise becoming more important, will become more important, libraries very, very involved in those. But then really thinking about from this holistic point of view, thinking about inside out library collections, thinking about what is available within the institution and making that available in more structured ways. This is that Purdue library and I quite like the way they've done it. They've got a range of sort of cultural heritage, special collections type things. They've got some digital scholarship type outputs. Then on the bottom line, they've got campus publishing initiative. They've got the archives, special collections. They've got the institution repository and they've got research data management. So here what you're seeing is a way of signalling and I like the way it's all brought together in the one part of the screen, a whole range of collections, special collections, digital scholarship from Purdue, local publishing initiatives, the repository, records management, research data management brought together and being shared with the world. What this means obviously and this is a report we've just done on social interoperability on campus that you are in discussion with all of these other stakeholders on campus around the nature of research support and where that goes. OK. So three collection directions accelerated and finally very quickly two imperatives that are now emerging. First to return to optimizing libraries have focused on building, managing and sharing collections. Greater attention is now turning to optimizing collections locally and across groups and this is part of the general optimization I mentioned earlier. So I sort of outlined some areas and we did the poll on places where there's going to be greater emphasis but clearly that involves a need for more decision support but also involves trade-offs. If you think about moving online very quickly, there's a temptation just to buy lots of packages, to buy in lots of things and there's a sort of trade-off between that and openness. If you think about putting more focus on inside out collections, you're probably going to take some resource away from more acquired collections. So, you know, there are trade-offs to be made here and decisions to be made here. I was quite interested in this Penn State University put up a note saying that they're having to reduce investment in collections and these are the things that they're looking at. But if you like, these are also the areas that you're thinking about optimizing against and there's trade-offs. So they're certainly focusing on what you need for coursework, they're focusing on electronic, removing duplication, which of course many libraries will have done already. They're looking at usage data, they're looking at diversity or pluralization, they're looking at collaboration and of course open access. So, you know, all of these things where increasingly people want to optimize against these objectives. And this is driving an interest in data-driven optimization. I mean the focus on unsub recently been very interesting in relation to journal literature. But there's a range of approaches to thinking about how you supply data that supports making decisions about collections and OCLC provides some here as well. But this will become much more important I think space because of the decisions that libraries need to make. Finally, pluralizing, libraries are pluralizing, collection services and perspectives. So they're all the communities they serve recognize their own knowledges, experiences, voices and memories and library services. And this has really come out as a very important issue for many libraries. Clearly, if you think about Australia, if you think about New Zealand, if you think about Canada, there has recently and for some time been a big focus on Indigenous peoples and recognition as various national initiatives have taken place that at the library level really need to think about pluralizing. Think about plural knowledge experiences, voices that people need to be able to recognize themselves, their identity in the services that they get. So certainly quite a bit of focus on thinking about how you decenter dominant perspectives and give a voice and a name to communities, collections, experiences that may have been overlooked, deliberately excluded, marginalized. A couple of examples, the top one is goldsmiths, quite like it, this actually precedes the current Black Lives Matter moment, a low-curious armour I think going into trouble for the same moment. But the current situation, but looking at decentering whiteness, I put this up, my daughter is a student at Goldsmiths, so I was looking at this, but looking at liberating the curriculum, looking at decentering whiteness, looking at diversifying the collection. The picture on the bottom is from Vancouver Public Library, but if you look at public libraries in Canada or all libraries in Canada, many of them, perhaps the majority of them will have a statement about support for Indigenous peoples or how they are thinking about shifting perspectives and collections. So we are certainly thinking about reckoning university libraries, librarians, collections, services, really thinking about how to respond to this awakening or this reckoning. I put up this example from University of North Carolina where they have a text mining project with the goal of discovering Jim Crow and racially biased legislation signed into law in North Carolina. So it's not just in the print collections and whatever, I put this in because of the focus in the digital manifesto as well on programmatic, on computational analysis of collections. So thinking about this across the range of collections, thinking about how do we diversify, pluralize perspectives and how does that manifest itself in collections so that the experiences, the memories, the identities of all our communities are represented and they can see themselves and find themselves and be represented there. Clearly quite a lot of discussion about this in various contexts. I put up the picture on the right because it's unusual to see reading lists mentioned in the national newspapers and then speaking of reading lists, quite an interesting document on the left looking at decolonizing reading lists. So strong focus emerging as an imperative optimizing, pluralizing and pluralizing one of the ways in which people want to optimize. OK, so I've spoken a little bit about some pandemic effects, spoken a little bit about how those three collection directions are being accelerated and then how these two imperatives are emerging around optimizing and pluralizing collections and really a lot going on. And as I say, I think more than we realize in some ways that the relationship of the library to the collection has changed, the collection has sort of been peeled away in a sense. What we're looking at is a range of services to satisfy needs, part of which is the existing collection, but it can also be satisfied in many, many other ways. So thank you very much for that and happy to have some discussion or take some questions. What we might do if we can is just bring up the poll again to see where it's finished off and I'll pass back to Robin. Thank you, Lorcan. That's yet again a masterpiece in terms of the direction, the depth and the breadth of what you've covered. Fantastic. And again, capturing the connectivity between separate contexts and demonstrating the significance for the sector and also flagging a direction of travel for us. Wonderful, and there's much food to talk here and I think we've got a range of questions that reflect that. If you're able to work through them, I'll pick off a few and hopefully we'll have time to deal with most of them. Did you want to make a comment on the poll first? Well, I think the shape is still very similar to before. Maybe the plural voices have come up a little bit, value for money, gone down. I still think obviously support for curriculum is very important and then openness reflecting a very important policy and practical consideration in library discussions. Fantastic, thank you. So perhaps I can start with almost an existential question. There was a debate some time ago about the library as the term and the people moving away from that and this is sort of connected in a sense. At what point do we start describing libraries as knowledge ecosystems moving away from the traditional books in the room to a series of interlinks, knowledge and research repositories? I feel like I'm in an interview. I just declare that I think library is a strong and powerful word and that we should not leave it behind. It does go to what I tried to say at the beginning though. I think the value, the identity and the workflow that we sometimes struggle with the perception of the library that is bound up with a researcher's undergraduate experience or it's very difficult to communicate the full array of what the library does in a snappy way. So what we end up with is we're prey to certain stereotypes or whatever. I think library though is a powerful word and we should try and develop a richer library story and keep it. Then some of the other things that you're talking about can come in as facets or aspects of that. The issue we have I suppose at library at the moment is we don't have a strong elevator pitch or as I said recently you have to be in a very tall building for the elevator pitch to work. But I think it would be a mistake to let library go as a word. Yes, I totally agree with you on that respect. It's that concept of interlinked repositories I think was quite interesting in that context. So there's a number of questions talking about effectively the external environments and publishers that control the influence on the library systems. And development as well. So are there ways in which we can influence that external world as it were and make the library direction the direction that's the powerful one? I mean this presumably a discussion about open access on the journal literature largely. Where I should say up front I spend less time. I am very struck by those discussions about the different positions that people come into it and even different commentators. You know that some people see journal publishing as a business and think about business drivers incentives and so on. And it's obvious that various of the larger publishers will move to open access publishing models in the context of being able to preserve certain revenue or margin. But if you think about the library group, certain funders will think about it more as a rational system that we need to design in various ways. But part of the issue is then it's populated by these commercial entities who are driven to behave in certain ways. And then clearly scholars, researchers and so on and there's no unified view coming from them. But very invested in the prestige economy, very invested in that reputation system. So it seems to me it's very complicated because you've got all of these different pieces in play and different practices and expectations across all of them. However, when you do step back and you look at what's happened over the last while, I think it is really very interesting to see the changes that have happened. Now are they the right changes, you know, a lot of discussion while moving to APCs, moving to gold, you know, what are we really changing in terms of the balance, the, you know, how successful, you know, is green discussions about transformational agreements, pro or con. You know, you're very familiar with all of that. So it seems to me there is no silver bullet, there is no clear answer here. I think from a library point of view what the library should be doing is advocating for the interests of the constituency they represent, which is the university and the individual researchers and continue to do that, which I think they have done quite effectively acknowledging that it is this very complicated system. So it's, you know, it's a really interesting environment with all of this activity going on. But I don't think there's a single response or answer there, which I think is really where perhaps you and your colleagues are or have landed. Yes, I think that's right. I mean, you talked, I think you mentioned harnessing and I've been quite struck by the way that the academic communities have been harnessed in negotiations with UCLA for example. Is there more we can do in that sort of arena? I think there's definitely an educational issue on campuses in terms of explaining the dynamic of the publishing environment and explaining. So if you think about what the bigger publishers are doing, you know, the move into university analytics, research analytics, you know, services there, moving into research or workflow. I mean, it's quite interesting looking at the acquisitions that Elsevier has made over the last 10 years or so. And I'm sure you've analyzed these where you can see where you have the services that are targeted at libraries in terms of buying bibliographic services, buying electronic journals. But then now you've got this huge suite of services that are targeted at individual researchers in terms of, you know, Mendeley, SSRN, the, you know, range of things. And then you've got the services that are targeted at research administration in terms of the university analytics and, you know, the, and something like pure sitting in between, you know, where various people have a stake. So what you have is this diversification into analytics and workflow to acknowledging, you know, that the publishing arm may be under a lot of pressure, how do you diversify in various ways and make those work together. So I think education of colleagues and so on about some of the dynamics of that marketplace. I mean, crucially it comes back, I think, to the reputation management issue and that's really very difficult because of the reliance on citations, impact factor and so on as the way. And, you know, as we all know people, I remember once talking to a colleague who's husband was a researcher and she said they came around some afternoon to watch soccer and compare their age factors, their age index, you know. So that sense of, you know, the researcher competitiveness and the measures and metrics that they use, you know, to look at that very much bound up with that publishing system. So I think it's a slow process, but I think really making universities aware of the dynamics of that marketplace of, you know, what's happening of some of the consequences of investment in these systems. On the other hand, we don't have a parallel prestige management reputation management system at the moment. No, no, indeed. Thank you. So shifting directions slightly here. You mentioned the move to open access. And there's a comment and a question, I guess, is OA globally the ultimate collective collection strategy? Well, I think, you know, you've got multiple strands, as I say, I, you know, because of OCLC's range of involvement in my background, I don't spend as much time on the journal side. I think if you think about the monograph literature, you know, books, clearly OA much, much slower there. I think we are seeing collective collection on the journal literature emerge much more strongly and, you know, OA is part of that. But even if you think about what people do, how people search for things. I mean, Google Scholar is the ultimate collective collection and it, you know, pulls together things. And you look at the other, you know, the other search engines in this space, you know, the one from the Allen Institute or, you know, Meta, Microsoft, academic search, they all trail behind Google Scholar. But when you think about access to the literature, you have that there, which is heavily used. And they do a reasonable job of trying to point to open access services. So I think that is true on the journal side. When you combine that with, if you've configured your knowledge base, if you're in an individual institution, you actually do have access to quite a wide range of things. But they aren't available to the public, of course. On the book side, I think it is quite interesting. I think we will see some effort to consolidate and bring into shared management more print collections just because of if they're releasing progressively less value. The opportunity cost goes up because we're needing to use the space and so on. And, you know, the general shift. And then you get into, you know, digitize. So I think the future of Hattie Trust is really very interesting. Does Hattie Trust remain where it is? Does it develop into much more of a global resource? I don't think there are any UK members at the moment of the Hattie Trust. But, you know, for that collective collection to work, you have to, it's very difficult to do it in a distributed way. So, you know, should there be a shared initiative looking at becoming part of Hattie Trust in the context? But then you run into all of the licensing issues. And I think control digital lending in that context is going to be a very interesting discussion over the next couple of years. And certainly, you know, it's going to be some court attention in the context of decisions there. Yes, indeed. Do you think we can change the copyright laws, the policies in that regard? That's certainly a big issue. Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, as I said, in a throwaway remark, I mean, I think the re-evaluating rights, where that line is, I mean, will be decided. You know, they'll have to be sort of lobbying and so on. Control digital lending, I think, is quite interesting. It requires infrastructure to support its operation, though, and then, you know, moving that forward. I think that is an area where the UK, with that national layer of attention from JISC and related things, has a certain advantage in some ways, because there's the opportunity to concentrate attention and focus. However, what it means maybe is, you know, there has to be more, I would say that the university librarians or others maybe should think about it more instrumentally. You know, what do we want to see and try and push those things through, acknowledging that influence and so on is diffused or difficult. But I think generally, I mean, that's one of the things I was going to say. I think, you know, we're seeing it here in the US. I think if you think about coming out of this, you know, there really are some things where, you know, that people are going to take a clearer or a stronger view. And I think advancing those requires people to be more instrumental in terms of the agencies available to them to effect change. And I think you can see that maybe in the US context, the consortia will be under, you know, the libraries will come into the consortia saying, we need to do this, this, this, but similarly, it seems to me that you have capacity, shared capacity to move things along. So, you know, really sort of thinking about what is important in that context, that's difficult because of the collective action issue. You know, can you all agree and then can you agree to change things for the general good, which is always a difficult thing. But it does seem to me that the agency question is very important. If you have agency, you have a body somewhere where you can pool your influence, pool your decision making, pool some other things, then it's a matter, though, of harnessing that to move things forward. Turning to the collective collection briefly. Do you think that a collective collection approach to digitisation would work for special and archival collections? Think about funding, selection, delivery access and so on. Yeah, I mean, in some ways, it's been surprising that we haven't seen a little bit more attention to this clearly you've got. Because I think a lot of it depends on aggregation, because you need to be able to discover the stuff and then request it. Clearly, you've had the DPLA in the US, you've got Europeana, which is some political motivation at the beginning. You've had various national initiatives around digitisation. I know that RLUK has been involved in the sort of looking at how to develop, as it were, a registry of digital copies. I mean, because it comes back to the decision support as well. You want to digitise things that are maybe rare or have not been digitised already. And it's difficult at the moment to find out whether something is rare or hasn't been digitised already. So there's an infrastructure issue there. And I think as the report pointed out, OCLC has a part there, but it's more potential than actual. I think it does depend on services coming together to allow you to discover and find stuff. Doing it in a very distributed way is difficult. I mean, if you're Cambridge and you have Newton and Darwin, then you have gravitational pull and people will go to see Newton and Darwin. But there are very few Cambridge. So pulling it together. Now, why hasn't it happened? I think it hasn't happened because number one of money, even though from a library point of view there's a view that this is very important. These are our treasures. The resources haven't necessarily gone into that area to build it up to make it important from a systems point of view and an aggregation point of view. So I think there's an issue there. I think there's also an issue on the demand side, on the research side. If you think about the monograph literature, the book literature, or if you think about the journal literature, you can actually assemble something that will satisfy most researchers, most learners. If you think about your discovery there, or if you think about Google Scholar, you've got a pretty good coverage of the research literature. You've got pretty good coverage of the book literature. However, when it comes to special collections, if I want to use special collections in my teaching, then I don't need it to be comprehensive. I can build nice learning resources on top of what I can currently find or what I can currently look at, and there's actually some quite interesting stuff along those lines. If I'm a researcher, though, I need comprehensiveness. I need to feel that I have prospected what's available in a particular area, or I have signposts to where I need to go. We don't have that comprehensiveness on that side, and something like Europan or DPLA certainly doesn't because it's really based on what people have sent to it. No offence, as my children would say. It's a bit random because it's coming from different directions. Now, there are some initiatives. We're part of a project at the moment called Nathan, National Archival Finding Aid Archival Network. Yes. I was looking for a second day, but it's in National. National Finding Aid Archival Network. What you have there is an exploration of an aggregation to allow you to find finding aids because there's a recognition for this to be effective. You really need to have a large mass of material because from the researcher point of view, there needs to be some feeling that they're prospecting a reasonably comprehensive resource. I suppose in that context, what impact do you think machine learning artificial intelligence might have in this area and also beyond? I think machine learning and artificial intelligence are accelerants rather than things that make a major change. They have to operate on stuff, so I think we can look to them as accelerants. If we assemble digitized material, if we do bring various things together, then we can add quite a bit of value maybe through machine learning. We can prospect them in various ways. I think they accelerate potentially what we can do with those, but they themselves aren't going to create the foundation or the infrastructure that allows us to assemble that material in the first place or decide what gets done. I should point out, and we're very aware of this now, and certainly going back to the pluralising question, we're very aware of the fact that machine learning artificial intelligence are as good as the data sets that they're given to learn on and to train. The various examples around facial recognition, the ways in which algorithmic choices, outputs are influenced by the data that they're working on, some of the decisions that are made. All of those things have become very much scrutinized of late, so I think some of the strong support for those approaches has become moderated by recognition that we really need to be careful about the data that they're working on, the results that they're producing. We don't want distorted or strange results. Thank you, Locke, and that's really interesting. We're coming almost to the end, I think, in terms of probably your energy, but I was wondering, there's a question about, you started off with talking about the differences between the UK and US and so on. There's a question about the libraries moving to support research, education or engagement, and away from the collections-based libraries. I wonder if that's perhaps more a US focus than UK. It's been part of the UK academic library strategy for a few years now. Maybe I phrased it wrongly. What I'm thinking is that if you think about your strategy document or some years ago, you would have talked about we provide access to information to make the university better place. We build collections to make them, and you still do that, and that's very important. The collection is still central. I didn't mean to suggest that the collection wasn't a central activity of what the library does. However, now what libraries will tend to do is to say, we support students' success and retention in the following ways. We support research productivity in the following ways. Then the collection is one of the services that actually does that in various ways. Rather than starting with the library, what's the library? The library provides access to information so that the campus is whatever. I think now what you'd probably say is the library supports research and learning by doing this, this and this, and the collection is a very important part of that. I think it's more an emphasis thing on one side. The other side is I think that our notion of collections is quite elastic. If you think about something very specific like demand-driven acquisition, or then just think about resource guides. Think about the huge effort that's gone into pointing people at resources elsewhere. If you think about all of the resource guides, we don't normally think about those as collecting, but effectively they're doing what collections are doing. They're trying to satisfy the needs of students largely. I remember when I went to an introduction session for my son when he was going to university. I turned up at the library session acknowledging this was a US institution. They did it all based on a resource guide. I think maybe it's a nuance, but the collection is central to what the library does. You don't hang the library story on access to information and collection. The library story is about support and research and learning, and the collection is a service that does valuable work there. You also do various other information management, information access, delivery, types of things to support that, that complement the collection. I think it depends on the institution as well. If I'm going back to Cambridge, if I'm Cambridge with Darwin and Newton and these big collections, I have a slightly different view of collections than if I'm a more learning oriented institution. People are excellent in different ways. Thank you. I guess we've come to almost the end, the last question perhaps, and we've returned to our users, which is quite a nice way to end. I'll read the question out, which is Virginia Will said that today the one needs a space of one's own. How do we support our users who want to map their own space in the collaborative library space and where they'll discover these interesting thoughts? I think the whole question about space is really very interesting as we move forward, and I think it will depend on the institution. I think the management of shared spaces, thinking about engagement in spaces, all of the types of things that have happened over the last few years will continue to be important. But there's going to be this public health layer imposed on everything, which is going to really, I think, change that. We don't know when the new normal is or when that's going to happen. That said, I think that sense, certainly in the residential model that's still a large part of what the universities do, that sense of a place to go, a place to consult, a place where you're not observed, a place to get your work done, a place to meet colleagues, a place to consult specialist expertise, a place where you potentially have equipment or resources available to you. All of that remains very important from an engagement, from a mental health, from a retention, a success, all of those things, really important. The impact of that public health layer, I think we've yet to see. It's one of the things you're going to have to work through in terms of the social distancing, wiping down surfaces, barriers between people, all of that that I'm sure you're very much immersed in. I do think that the issue clearly, there's major issues for students working at home, just given the equity issues, the divides that this has thrown up in terms of access to equipment, access to broadband, access to space, to the Virginia Woolf issue. Space is a luxury commodity in the context of if you are in a big house, if you have access to that space, presence of children. I think the various studies showing publication rates, how now with researchers being at home, a proportion of publications by women has dropped because the domestic burden, the children burden is stronger on them now than it was, maybe overall. So you've got all of these factors at play. I think part of it goes back to that sense of engagement and the relational thing that universities are going to have to rethink how they connect with various people, how they develop relations. And I think from a library point of view, that's also quite important. Clearly there's a scale issue there then because you can't reach everybody. I'm very struck by the fact, and this is a tangent, various public libraries now do comfort calls. They call people that are on their own or that they know have some issues. And it's just because they recognize that previously those people did spend some time in the library, maybe came into the library, and that they might welcome a human contact, human touch, human connections. So I think there is a real challenge in terms of how you think about in the context of a shift to digital or a shift to this more holistic library context where you have to provide more of what you do through that, how you achieve that sense of connection and engagement, the relational ties that are quite important. My colleague Lynn Conaway a few years ago did some work on virtual reference where one of the reasons students weren't using virtual reference as much as people thought was they didn't want to have an interaction with somebody anonymous, even though it was a librarian, even though it was a secure place, even though they felt that you make a connection with somebody and then you do things. But without that connection, they didn't do the results. So I think this is a general challenge for universities and for libraries within that. Thank you, Mark. We must finish there and I realize that my enthusiasm has let me run over time for both my viewers and the audiences. Thank you. Wonderful thought provoking productive session and a great beginning to our series of digital shift forum events.