Peak Bodies Forum 2008

Minutes

Minutes of the Peak Bodies Forum, Friday 9 May, 2008

Attendees

Margaret Allen                         National and State Libraries Australasia

Greg Anderson                         Council of Australian University Librarians

Stuart Ferguson                        Representing Library and Information Studies sector

Sue Hutley                                Australian Library and Information Association

Cynthia Love                            CSIRO

Sue Martin                               Australian School Library Association

Nola Adcock                           Association of Parliamentary Libraries of Australasia

Mary Teague                            Australian Government Libraries Information Network

Heather Todd                           Health Libraries Australia

Geoff Strempel                         Public Libraries Australia

Derek Whitehead                     Australian Library and Information Association

Petal Kinder                             Australian Law Librarians Association

Jan Fullerton (Chair)                 National Library of Australia

Margy Burn                              National Library of Australia (afternoon)

Jasmine Cameron                     National Library of Australia

Warwick Cathro                       National Library of Australia

Pam Gatenby                            National Library of Australia

Michelle Potter (Minutes)          National Library of Australia

 

1.     Welcome

Jan Fullerton welcomed delegates to the meeting and spoke about the importance of the peak bodies meeting as a means of ensuring continuity and managing issues across the sector.

2.      Minutes of the previous meeting.

There were no amendments to the minutes of the previous meeting.

3.     National site licensing and the future of ERA (Pam Gatenby)

Ms Gatenby noted that the sector was now able to look back on one year of experience in handling site licensing — the process had begun in May 2007. She reported that 470 libraries were participating in the scheme and there were now over 1,000 subscriptions. She noted some of the issues that had arisen over the year, which included:

(i) the need to support both calendar and financial year subscription cycles

(ii) how to negotiate with vendors as part of a package

(iii) how to negotiate a fair price

(iv) the process of calling for expressions of interest

(v) the funding model

(vi) relations between ERA systems and others with similar objectives

In the ensuing discussion it was agreed that some concrete ways of achieving improvement were to:

(i) develop an awareness of what other consortia overseas were doing

(ii) share knowledge and spend time looking at contracts and clauses

(iii) speak more overtly with other licensing groups

(iv) investigate the scope for ERA and CEIRC to work together.

ACTIONS:

The Forum agreed that there was a need for consortia to liaise and for there to be an annual meeting for frank discussions on licensing.

4. OCLC membership (Pam Gatenby)

Ms Gatenby reported that an agreement had been reached on giving Australian users access to WorldCat and to make records available through the Libraries Australia service. Members of Libraries Australia also become voting members of WorldCat. She also noted that searching has risen steadily from 100,000 to 600,000 and the National Library’s records are now loaded leading to a rise in requests for copies of material through Document Supply. As a result Ms Gatenby noted that there was now a need to negotiate a national approach to enable full membership and for Australian content to be available world wide.

5. Physical library spaces (Greg Anderson)

Mr Anderson’s presentation highlighted the changing nature of libraries and the need for new physical spaces to accommodate changing needs and interests of readers. In the ensuing discussion the Forum noted that while the use of book and print journals is trending down the use of online journals is increasing markedly. Loans continue to be strong as a result of increased traffic from use of open access computers. Physical Library Spaces.

6. Workforce issues (Greg Anderson; Derek Whitehead)

Mr Whitehead spoke to his presentation and focused on issues that had arisen at the Australian Library and Information Association summit held at the State Library of Victoria in March 2008. The main issues identified were skills shortages, course recognition processes for the profession, qualifications, recruitment the role of employers and eligibility for admission to the profession.

The Forum noted a need to convene a series of meetings for educators and employers to strengthen strategic partnerships between stakeholders. The Forum noted the existence of an ageing workforce. Mr Whitehead advised that recruitment was the core issue and there was an urgent need to attract prospective librarians to courses, to offer on-the-job training and to address attention to all potential professionals.

Mr Anderson noted that there was a need for a diversity of courses being offered and suggested that a collaborative pooling of courses amongst institutions would enable courses to be wide-ranging in scope.

ACTIONS: The Forum agreed that ALIA should lead on workforce issues and that Peak Bodies would support ALIA in its endeavours to address the topic; Ms Allen agreed to circulate a paper on the ageing workforce.

7.    E-research and data management (CAUL)

The Forum noted in relation to this paper that traditionally copyright centres on the individual and that this presents problems in an era of e-research in which there is a more open approach to copyright. The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) notes a need for the growth and development of new roles for librarians including copyright training and policy and advocacy skills. Presentation.

8.     Education for information  (Stuart Ferguson)

Mr Ferguson presented an informative paper and the forum supported his observations.

9.     Consortium of European Research Libraries

This agenda item was not discussed due to time constraints. The consortium’s website is at: http://www.cerl.org/web/

10. Reimagining Library Services (RLS) Strategic Plan

Ms Allen spoke to the RLS strategic plan noting in particular the aim of a shared commitment to transforming our libraries. She highlighted three strategic issues:

  • the concept of one library
  • the transformation of library culture
  • the need to make content available so that it can be used and transformed

There was general agreement by the Forum that the document was informative, inspiring and challenging. All agreed that resourcing the plan is the major issue to be faced but that it was important to achieve an outcome. Ms Allen advised that the document would be reshaped in response to comments received as a result of the RLS survey and that implementation of the plan would then begin.

The origins and progress of the project is outlined on the NSLA website: http://www.nsla.org.au/projects/

11.   Resource Description and Access (RDA) issues (Pam Gatenby)

Ms Gatenby spoke on the significant changes to the role of libraries in making data available and shareable in an online world. She noted the need to provide explicit guidelines for describing digital items and that were not linked to a specific encoding system. Ms Gatenby emphasised that the initiative being developed was generic in that it was hospitable to every format. She anticipated the findings of the study would be published by March 2009.

12.   National Library of Australia strategic directions — input from Peak Bodies

Ms Fullerton focused on the future role of the National Library in the Peak Bodies Forum. She noted the need for advocacy for libraries. Ms Cameron noted that following previous discussions the meetings should be issues-based. The Forum agreed that Peak Bodies was a useful forum and a means of using combined strengths to implement change. It should be continued.   

13.   Managing special collections (Ms Burn)

Ms Burn highlighted the significance of special collection materials in giving distinctiveness to institutions and noted that there was room in the NSLA Reimagining draft for such collections. She emphasised that special collections were key elements in resource discovery and that online access was an essential starting point. She informed the Forum that the Library was focusing on digital delivery of audio and access to Library material from the oral history and folklore collection would be available over the Library’s catalogue in the second half of 2008. The ensuing discussion centred problems associated with standard practices and tools for dealing with special collections, on current initiatives with the Library’s map collecting and on the use of repositories by Universities to manage special collections in order to better address copyright issues.

14.   Newspaper digitisation (Ms Gatenby)

Ms Gatenby advised the Forum on progress with the Newspaper digitisation plan noting that the database would span the period 1893–1954 and would contain one major newspaper from each Australian state and territory and in the future would extend to regional areas. She noted that full text search would be free of charge. She informed the Forum that the Library was currently working on issues surrounding standards and how the Library might ingest material being digitised by other libraries.

15.   Rights management: NLA system (Dr Cathro)

Dr Cathro centred his paper on the development of the Library’s algorithm to predict the copyright status of collection items. He noted that he was interested in pursuing interoperability with the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) in order to be able to access CAL’s material but there were limiting factors as CAL’s specific area of interest was licensing. Dr Cathro also spoke about legacy data, which would need to be loaded at a future date. 

16.   VuFind (Dr Cathro)

Dr Cathro advised the Forum of the Library’s interest in open source software and its plans to release a new catalogue using VuFind software rather than Voyager. He noted the advantages of this new initiative, which included better relevance ranking and the addition of tags.

17.   Mellon ILS project (Dr Cathro)

Dr Cathro informed the Forum of the Mellon funded project in collaboration with duke University, North Carolina, to develop requirements and software to support all workflows. He noted that the Library was developing a project on workflow analysis using Business Process Modelling tools that would contribute to the Mellon project.

18.   International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) 2010

Ms Hutley informed the Forum that the IFLA conference for 2010 would be held in Brisbane, 15–19 August. She advised prospective participants to consulted the website: http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla76/index.htm, and noted that the organisers were expecting between 4–5,000 delegates.

19. Other business

Sue Martin presented a well received paper outlining the achievements of and the challenges and concerns facing the Australian School Library Association with a series of recommendations for school librarianship and education policy makers. 

Back to the top