Andrew Wells, University Librarian of the University of New South Wales gave a talk on Australian university libraries: challenges and opportunities on 9 April 2007 at the UNSW Asia Library on Kay Siang Road. The talk was an event jointly organised by LAS and UNSW Asia Library.
Professor Greg Whittred, UNSW Asia President, welcomed all 63 participants and outlined the reasons for the event which were to contribute to professional development for librarians, to mark the birth of the newest university library in Singapore (in operation for 4 weeks since 12 March) and to thank the library community for its help and support. Professor Bruce Milthorpe, UNSW Asia Deputy President-Academic, introduced Mr Andrew Wells.
Andrew started with an overview of Australian academic libraries. In 2005, there were 38 universities with 230 libraries employing over 4,000 staff with a total budget of A$520m. There were over 300,000 inter-library loans and over 200,000 documents delivered which showed a strong level of inter-dependence and cooperation between libraries as interlibrary lending is voluntary.
It was highlighted that there was no magic formula for library funding. University libraries are jointly funded by state or territory governments and by the federal government, together with individual university self-funding sources.
Advocacy is important and is lead by groups such as Universities Australia, the Group of Eight (go8) and the Australian Technology Network. Collaboration is lead by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) which seeks to provide a common voice and representation for all university libraries and to promote common interests.
CAUL also provides surveys of salaries, annual library statistics and instruments for performance management. It makes submissions for amendments to the Copyright Act. It employs a dedicated lawyer who focuses on lobbying copyright issues.
As part of CAUL, the CAUL Electronic Information Resources Committee (CEIRC) has worked to improve access to electronic resources for Australian university libraries in a cost-effective manner. CEIRC negotiates with vendors to have licenses to which include appropriate clauses for areas like document delivery and course packs which are needed by university libraries. CEIRC takes a unified approach to electronic resources purchasing and has helped university libraries to save money when they opt in to the consortia pricing available. CEIRC achieved consortia pricing for 147 products from 98 vendors.
Challenges that Australian university libraries face could be grouped into the following categories:
Finance
University libraries face price increases without increases in their budget and allowances for currency inflation. They also have problems raising capital for buildings and for storage of collections. Andrew commented that many Australian libraries look “a little tired”. Universities are money-hungry places and libraries seldom get funding for refurbishment. He recommended the University of Queensland Library as one that had been successfully refurbished and worth a visit.
Organization
University administrators were not sure where to put libraries and they have been converged with IT, with learning and teaching, or separate but under resources or the academic section. Andrew personally felt that libraries belong under the academic section.
Libraries have also been wrestling with internal restructuring which became necessary as the environment they operate in has changed. For example, libraries needed to respond to the effects of the Internet which led to people not visiting libraries as much.
Value
Libraries were being asked to show how they added value and to demonstrate their contribution by their hard-headed bosses. The data currently available does not clearly show the contribution of libraries. It is becoming increasingly important to show that investment in libraries pay off in terms of research and academic outcomes.
Research
Although the idea that libraries were necessary to support research is well established, there are still areas to build on. They were institutional repositories and the Research Quality Framework. With the Australasian Digital Theses Program, access to over 12,000 theses online is provided. Some of which are locally hosted or available via vendor sites. In response to the government’s call to promote access to Australian research, ARROW was started. It makes research literature which is not peer-reviewed available to the world. It uses VITAL and Fedora to manage the repositories created. These were projects led by university libraries.
The second area is the Research Quality Framework which aims to have a better assessment of the quality and impact of publicly funded research. Libraries could work to make the research accessible online but there are copyright issues involved.
Restructuring in UNSW Library
In UNSW Library, there had been a shift to online resources and the visibility of librarians was much reduced. They have looked at ways to respond to the changes but implementing the changes has been hard. One of the changes was to restructure the Information Services Department from a model of special libraries to teams focused on various stages of the service cycle with more librarians doing outreach.
They are also looking at the ways they report on the performance measures of the library. Most of the current statistics focus on areas that were important in the past but were not reflecting the library as it is currently. Online access to resources is growing but not reported, and loans of the print collection is not growing but is reported. Hence the need for more current performance measures for the library which is a project that they are starting on.
Andrew emphasized that we should not lose our traditions but we need to embrace new ones to help libraries and librarians remain relevant to their users.
Isabella Trahn, Director, UNSW Asia Library thanked Andrew Wells for giving the talk. She was grateful for his support of UNSW Asia Library. She also thanked DA for helping UNSW Asia Library to bring the collection together and sponsoring the refreshments for the talk.
Contributed by Yeo Pin Pin