Supporting Research Needs in the 21st Century

1
Supporting Research Needs in the 21st Century

• Some Thoughts on
• Information Service Evolution

2
Missions and meanings

• The institutional mission
• Teaching
• Research
• The context local, national, global

3
Research whats it for?

• Progress
• Enlightenment
• Evolution
• Truth
• Heritage
• Creativity

• Store of knowledge
• Curiosity
• Profit
• Career
• National interest
• Institutional interest

4
Researcherswhat do they look like?

• Staff and p/g research
• Independent researchers
• 10 of all UK academic library users

• Pushing the envelope
• Research degrees
• Text-based
• Lab-based
• Commercial
• Producing theses, articles, monographs
• Information - hungry
• (Part-) owners of intellectual property

5
Whats strange about the UK?

• Number of research-active institutions
• Peer grading of research quality
• Money follows grading
• Overt competition for central funds

6
Distortions

• Salami publishing
• Need for more places to publish in
• Commercial and pure research intermingling
• Headhunting
• Research directions unconnected to areas of
  library excellence
• Lack of time to think it all out again

7
The view from the Library

• National and regional cooperation
• Investigation
• Finance
• E-resources
• The hybrid library

8
National cooperation

• Pilot programmes and beyond
• Leadership
• DNC DNER
• Full disclosure
• Deeper collaboration
• Cross-sectoral

9
E-resources

• Electronic journals and the logjam in scholarly
  communications
• SPARC
• Open archives
• Theses
• Digitisation programmes creation and
  preservation

10
Lets hear it for the staff

• Range of expertise and expectation
• Training and development the key