UK Academic Libraries Research Articles

Wellbeing Collections in UK Academic Libraries

Academic libraries in the UK are playing a more prominent role in the mental health and wellbeing of students. Wellbeing collections have emerged as one way to do this but are under-researched. The aim of this paper is to investigate the development of wellbeing collections at UK institutions. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of participants at six different UK universities, each with varying strategic priorities, budgets, and student demographics. Data about each collection was also analyzed. The collections had all been created in the last five years. They varied significantly in the range of content. All were based on extensive collaborations, but student involvement was low. All were actively promoted through multiple channels. A more systematic evaluation of these collections would support greater recognition of wellbeing support by libraries, but this is inhibited by limited resources and a lack of clarity of definition of wellbeing.

A simple plan? Reflections on how a library service secured investment for a new library management system

The purpose of this article is to report and reflect on how a UK academic library secured investment for a new library management system. This is written from the perspective of the former Head of Service. This is a professional article which describes the organisational context and the stages of the initiative, including planning and implementation. The article sets the organisational context of the Library Service, which was formed out of the merger of 5 libraries. The author highlights issues which staff identified with the library management system (LMS) and the initial information gathering exercise to assess alternatives. The article describes an initial failed bid for investment and stages of hiatus due to unexpected events like COVID-19. The article describes how the Library developed a wider vision, and lobbied for wider support for digital changes through a cross-organisational group. The article describes the second bid for investment, and key features of this which made it successful. The author offers reflections on the failure and success of the project, and lessons from the experience. The article highlights that contextual evidence is vital to secure investment in library initiatives. It indicates that a story-telling approach to writing a business case can be powerful, in addition to market and sector data. It highlights the attributes and skills which library leaders might need in order to drive forward major strategic change. The author highlights some considerations for future policy and research, particularly around how library leaders can be equipped with skills.

Aligned but not integrated: UK academic library support to mental health and well-being during COVID-19

PurposeTo discover how UK academic libraries sought to support student mental health and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe data was from a 24-question survey of UK universities distributed in May 2021 which received 56 responses from 47 different Higher Education Institution libraries. Descriptive statistics are combined with thematic analysis of open text comments.FindingsLibraries were undertaking a wide range of activities, targeted chiefly at students and broadcast via Twitter, other social media and library web sites. The problem being addressed was the stresses of studying in the context of the pivot online and isolation caused by social distancing. Digital well-being seemed also to be an increased concern. COVID-19 had proved the value of digital support but created a number of challenges such as loss of physical space, communication barriers and lack of extra resource. The role had a somewhat informal place in the organisation. Overall library activities were aligned but not strongly integrated into institutional efforts.Research limitations/implicationsThis was a study in one specific national context with a relatively limited number of total responses. There could be a non-response bias where respondents were doing more than was typical in the sector.Originality/valueThe paper is one of the first papers to gather sector wide data and move beyond case studies of what individual libraries due to support to mental health and well-being. It also offers a case study of the impacts of COVID-19 on management pointing to its catalysing the digital shift, creating constraints on resources and communication and prompting the emergence of staff well-being as a consideration in management decision making.

Library support for student mental health and well-being in the UK: Before and during the COVID-19 pandemic

Libraries increasingly seek to support the mental health and well-being of students. This study reports on the results of a survey examining the range of such support activities offered by UK academic libraries prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic libraries' emphasis was on new library specific services such as a fiction collection, a type of initiative taken to proactively align with institutional policy. During the pandemic focus shifted somewhat to addressing the anxiety related to finding e-resources. Drawing on the survey data a holistic model of library support for student mental health and well-being is developed, capturing its eight different aspects: inherent library value, library services impact, well-being as a library service, detection, hosting, signposting, library as a good partner and library staff well-being. This represents a framework through which to examine how an academic library can support student mental health and well-being, and complements the “whole university” approach being increasingly adopted in the UK.

Services for Student Well-Being in Academic Libraries: Three Challenges

There has been a wave of interest in UK academic libraries in developing services to support student well-being. This paper identifies three fundamental and interrelated issues that need to be addressed to make such initiatives effective and sustainable. Firstly, well-being has to be defined and the impacts of interventions must be measured in appropriate ways. Secondly, there is a need to identify the true nature of the underlying social problem around well-being. Thirdly, relevant approaches to the issue need to be located within the professional knowledge base of librarianship.

The Impact of RDS on Usage of Electronic Content in UK Academic Libraries: Selected Results from a UKSG-Funded Project

Resource discovery services (RDS), also called web-scale discovery services (WDS), have attracted considerable attention in recent years. This article aims to provide an environmental scan of the adoption of RDS in UK higher education libraries and provide an analysis of RDS resource usage data to gauge whether RDS have an impact on the overall usage of ejournals and ebooks. Findings show that there appears to be a positive impact in most cases, although the extent of this impact varies across libraries and publishers. There is undeniably a degree of complexity in the usage analysis owing to the multidimensional nature of the environment.

IRUS-UK: Improving understanding of the value and impact of institutional repositories

>> See video of presentation (21 min.) Many educational institutions have repositories for research outputs. The number of items available through institutional repositories is growing, and is expected to continue to do so due to requirements for outputs from public-funded research to be open access. But how much usage are institutional repositories and their individual items getting?Jisc-funded service IRUS-UK is designed to help institutions understand more about the usage of their institutional repositories. It follows on from the successful PIRUS2 project, which demonstrated how COUNTER-compliant article-level usage statistics could be collected and consolidated from publishers and institutional repositories. IRUS-UK collects raw usage data from participating repositories and processes these into COUNTER-compliant statistics. This provides repositories with comparable, authoritative, standards-based data and opportunities for profiling and benchmarking. It enables institutions to run reports at both repository level (e.g. total download figures) and at item level. IRUS-UK has developed a taxonomy of 25 item types which all items are mapped to so that usage across specific item types (e.g. Article, Book Section) can be consistently compared. IRUS-UK currently has data from 63 UK institutional repositories, and has recorded over 17 million downloads since July 2012. The data from IRUS-UK can be used to provide information for management reporting, for usage monitoring, and for external reporting (such as annual SCONUL statistics for UK academic libraries). Data can be viewed within the online portal, or downloaded for further analysis. IRUS-UK recognises that institutional repository usage statistics may not represent total usage, and is investigating ways to combine usage to support institutions in their overall usage statistics. One development is usage figures for electronic theses and dissertations; IRUS-UK has demonstrated the possibility of consolidating usage statistics from institutional repositories and from the British Library’s Electronic Theses Online Service (EThOS) to show total usage.IRUS-UK is a community-driven development, responding to user needs. User feedback has always been core to the service, and continues to develop with the establishment of a Community Advisory Group. Excellent feedback has been received from users on the ease and speed of set-up, and the value of having consistent, standards-based usage statistics and benchmarking opportunities.IRUS-UK: http://irus.mimas.ac.uk/PIRUS2: http://www.cranfieldlibrary.cranfield.ac.uk/pirus2/tiki-index.php

Safety in numbers: developing a shared analytics service for academic libraries

Purpose – It is clear that libraries consider the use of data to inform decision making a top priority in the next five years. JISC's considerable work on activity data has highlighted the lack of tools and services for libraries to exploit this data. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of a shared analytics service for UK academic libraries and introduce the JISC Library Analytics and Metrics Project. The project aims to help libraries effectively management collections and services as well as delivering pre-emptive indicators and “actionable insights” to help identify new trends, personalise services and improve efficiencies, economies and effectiveness (student attainment and satisfaction and institutional reputation, for example). The project builds on the Library Impact Data Project at the University of Huddersfield and the work of the Copac Activity Data and Collections Management tools. The paper will deliver a case study of the project, its progress to date, the challenges of such an approach and the implications the service has for academic libraries. Design/methodology/approach – The paper will be a case study of the project and its institutional partners and early adopters work to date and explore both the technical and cultural challenges of the work as well as its implications for the role of the library within the institution and the services it provides. Specifically the case study will comprise of the following aspects: a brief history of the work and the context of library analytics services in the UK (and internationally). A description of the approach adopted by the project, and the vision and goals of the project. Exploration of the challenges associated with the project. Outline of the implications of the project and the resultant service. Findings – This paper will report on the initial findings of the project, which will run from January to December 2013. In particular it will consider the issues surfaced through the close engagement with the academic library community (through the projects community advisory and planning group) and the institutional early adopters around data gathering and analysis. Practical implications – Data accumulated in one context has the potential to inform decisions and interventions elsewhere. While there are a number of recognised and well-understood use cases for library analytics these tend to revolve around usage and collection management. Yet, the potential of a shared analytics service is in uncovering those links and indicators across diverse data sets. The paper will consider a number of practical impacts: performance – benchmarking, student attainment and research productivity; design – fine tuning services, personalised support; trends – research landscape, student marketplace, utilisation of resources. The case study will explore these practical implications for libraries and what they mean for the future of the library within the academy. Originality/value – The paper will present a case study of a unique service that currently fills an important gap within the library analytics space. The paper will focus on the services potential to transform both the way the library works and how it is perceived by its users, as well as its role and relationship within the broader institution.

Lessons Learned: Jisc's Experience in Acquiring Multimedia Resources on Behalf of UK Academic Libraries

Lessons Learned: Jisc's Experience in Acquiring Multimedia Resources on Behalf of UK Academic Libraries

Book reviews

Kingma, Bruce R. The economics of information; A giode to economics and cost-benefit analysis for information professionals.
 
 Creaser, Claire and Spiller, Davis. LISU annual library statistics: Featuring trend analysis of UK public and academic libraries.
 
 Creaser, Claire. A survey of library services to schools and children in the UK 1995-96.

RDA in Copac: A Practical Assessment

Copac is best known as the UK national, academic and specialist research library catalogue, but the Copac team also provide the RLUK shared cataloguing database; thus changes in cataloguing standards mean considering the impact and potential of RDA across both services. This paper discusses initial thoughts on issues around adopting RDA from a union catalogue perspective, looking at some of the implications for data standardization, as well as deduplication and display. However Copac is not working in isolation: the union catalogue data is supplied by RLUK members, plus increasing numbers of other specialist institutions, so Copac staff carried out a short contributor survey in spring 2012 to gain an understanding of their contributors' plans, with a partial update to this in spring 2013. In general larger institutions were further ahead with their planning, whilst for some libraries there was still uncertainty over whether to move to RDA. For those planning to move to RDA the timescales vary significantly and Copac will be supporting AACR2 for some time to come. As for most libraries, Copac has limited resources. The staff are involved in a diverse range of activities, so they are conscious of the resource implications of any developments. However, they are also keen to explore the potential within RDA for new flexibility and relationships for the benefit of its user communities, alongside the enhanced potential for working with new data formats, including linked data.

The JISC

JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee, was started in 1993 to serve the needs of the newly expanded UK Higher Education (HE) sector. This article describes how JISC supported the universities' information needs by exploiting the potential of IT, and the internet in particular. The author concludes that the impact of the e-Lib programme – the largest innovation programme that JISC managed in its first years and which was chaired by Brindley – on UK Higher Education and the UK library profession was considerable and it had significant impact on the UK academic libraries by affecting a major culture change. Brindley was very influential within the JISC. JISC owes much of its success to the early work of the 1990s and Lynne Brindley's dedication and visionary inspiration during this time.

Adding Value to Usage Statistics: The Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) Enhancements

The Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) provides a single point of access to journal usage data from participating publishers on behalf of UK academic libraries. In August 2011 JISC awarded funding to develop two value-added enhancements to support existing service provision and help libraries assess the value and impact of e-resources. This article describes the development of these enhancements and their impact.

Performance measurement in a changing environment

PurposeIncreased use and changes in the way e‐resources are delivered led some libraries to question the detail of some of the definitions used and particularly to suggest that statistics required by SCONUL did not always match the requirements or practice of the libraries themselves. The purpose of this paper is to explore a set of e‐measures.Design/methodology/approachA pilot project was set up to test a set of e‐measures, sufficiently robust to give confidence in their use in a national/international context and in benchmarking individual libraries. A total of 20 SCONUL members made quarterly returns during 2009‐10. During the year, categories and definitions were adjusted in the light of comments received. A workshop was held to exchange views and inform the decision on what went into the new return.FindingsIt was clear from the start that practice varied, and compromise would be required. Foremost among the changes are: inclusion of e‐resources held within databases in the count of titles; count of free titles or titles purchased in previous years; inclusion of database searches; separation of costs of different types of e‐resource.Originality/valueThe SCONUL statistics are a tool and servant of the members, helping libraries to run more effectively, and at the same time providing valuable evidence on UK academic libraries and their activities to the wider world. The new e‐measures questions will provide a reliable picture of the use of e‐resources across the sector and be useful to libraries individually or in benchmarking groups in assessing their own usage.

The Application of QR Codes in UK Academic Libraries

Quick Response (QR) codes are relatively new in the UK, although they have been used very successfully in Japan. Two examples of the use of QR codes for commercial product promotion are outlined, one successful, the other a failure. Against this background, this article considers the increasing need for academic libraries to promote their services and resources to a “mobile clientele.” It reports on two case studies of UK academic libraries that use QR codes to promote library resources. It also gives an account of a pilot exercise at Loughborough University Library where QR codes were briefly tested. The research found that, although awareness and use of QR codes in the UK was increasing and that certain types of QR codes, when used in academic libraries, were more successful than others, none of them were as successful as anticipated. Other new and more sophisticated technology was being developed which suggested that QR codes might simply be a bridging technology.

New developments at Copac: access to the merged online catalogues of major UK and Irish academic libraries

Purpose – This paper's aim is to describe recent developments at Copac – the service that gives access to the merged catalogues of many online catalogues of major university, specialist and national libraries in the UK and Ireland, including the British Library.Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a descriptive account.Findings – The paper identifies and describes some major improvements that are being made to Copac.Originality/value – The paper is a valuable update on the service provided by Copac.

Developing learning landscapes: academic libraries driving organisational change

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the reasons and drivers for academic libraries affecting university strategy with regards to shaping and developing learning spaces in response to changing pedagogic behaviours.Design/methodology/approach – A review of available literature within the context of academic libraries and their position to influence and lead institutional strategic change. This theory and practice is addressed and evidenced by four case studies of university libraries in the UK.Findings – Many UK academic libraries find themselves able to lead on and influence their institution's strategic direction with regards to teaching, learning and research. This is particularly the case in the design and development of learning spaces within the university. Academic libraries are in a unique position within a university with a view to observing student behaviours, being responsive to ever changing demands from academics and students, spotting trends and benchmarking against comparative i...

Strategic development of UK academic library websites: A survey of East Midlands university libraries

The strategic development of an academic library website is an ongoing process. The methods available to libraries in their efforts to understand the use of their website are also changing. A pilot survey of a group of UK academic libraries provided an insight into the approaches and methods adopted by this group. The study also revealed some of the issues these libraries faced in maintaining a website capable of satisfying the needs of its users. This group of libraries demonstrated that practical measures to develop their sites are being taken. However, in some cases a library’s ability to develop its site was constrained by institutional procedures and processes. Lessons learnt from this pilot will be implemented in a national survey of UK academic libraries.

Virtual reference in UK academic libraries

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a snapshot of virtual reference services (the use of instant messaging or chat for enquiries) in UK academic libraries, and provide information about software for libraries considering providing a virtual reference service.Design/methodology/approach – The paper summarises the results of a 2008 UK‐wide survey of academic libraries and gives a brief overview and comparison matrix of top virtual reference software products as tested by the Virtual Enquiry Project.Findings – Virtual reference services are not widespread in UK academic libraries. However, current service providers are planning to continue or expand services and a majority of academic libraries surveyed are considering starting a service.Originality/value – This is the first survey of its kind among UK academic libraries.

How UK academic libraries choose metasearch systems

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate how UK academic libraries choose metasearch systems; the choice processes they use; the main influences on their choices; and whether these choice processes could be made easier.Design/methodology/approachThe project used a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research methods, consisting of a literature review, two semi‐structured interviews, and an electronic questionnaire, distributed to systems librarians in UK university libraries.FindingsIt was found that many processes are repeated across libraries. It was also found that a prior/existing relationship with vendors has a strong influence on how libraries chose metasearch systems.Originality/valueThere has been no prior research explicitly investigating how a range‐of‐libraries chose metasearch systems. The results could be of value to libraries that are choosing a metasearch system, or other systems such as library management systems. It could also be of value to anyone interested in general choice procedures in libraries.