Long Tails & Efficiencies of ScaleSupporting arts & humanities research today and into the future

Joy Palmerjoy.palmer@manchester.ac.uk

@joypalmer

Delivering several key JISC national library & bibliographic services

Copac

Archives Hub

Zetoc

Journals Usage Stats Portal

Historical Books & Journals

i.e. supporting arts & humanities researchwith far, far less resource

So for any services we need to articulate

impact & value

sustainability

the BUSINESS CASE

user demand

benefits

Shared services

Resource discovery shared services for researchers

Copac» Online national union

catalogue» 55 libraries +» Research libraries &

special collections» 50 million+ library records» 800,000 – 1 million search

sessions per month

Archives Hub» Online finding aid» 187 archival repositories +» HEIs & specialist archives» 22,000 archival

descriptions» 50,000 search sessions

per month

Aggregation

Value added via:

Normalisation

Collaboration

Scale

Benefits for libraries

“It saves us an immense amount of time because otherwise we would have to try and guess where something would come from because we just wouldn’t have the time to go through all of those libraries separately, so it really is a very useful tool.”

Creating efficiencies…

“It would cripple our document supply service because we’re such a small department, we just wouldn’t be able to provide an effective service.”

Providing quality information

“[if it didn’t exist] there would be a much greater chance of missing things, getting references wrong, not finding correct references and more cases where the reader did not find what they were looking for.”

Supporting quality research

“It would certainly reduce the range of sources that we used for foreign material, and it would make it much harder for us to supply difficult, particularly foreign language material to our readers.”

» Substantially more respondents use Copac than the other 2 services

» 40% of Hub respondents s are involved in FE & HE

» Most Copac respondents work in the historical & philosophical studies subject area

» Most Zetoc respondents work in sciences, agriculture and medicine

Centrifugal searchers

‘Berry-picking’ from various trails

Forensic in nature

How do they search?

Location information

What do they value?

Comprehensiveness

Accuracy

Digital surrogates

The object itself…

Benefits to users…

“without this it would take me so long to try and track down records and it would cost me a lot of money to

travel to libraries to look though their online records if it was only limited to access at their library. I probably

couldn’t have included the most up-to-date research or found historical research” (Archaeology, Postgrad)

Serendipity

“…it’s a unique first step into a whole network of all sorts of possibilities. Not just the high-tech ones and the digital

ones, but also locating resources, locating people who know about them

and developing your personal networks”

Discovering the rare, the unique, the unknown…

“As a UK academic researcher I am really pleased with the service that Copac provides in enabling me to find rare

resources which are not available at my institution. I wouldn't be able to find

things without it”

“(Copac) is extremely helpful to search Arabic sources.

It helps to avoid the inconsistencies in the transliteration of Arabic and Hebrew

scripts of individual catalogues.”

Saving time for actual research

“without this it would take me so long to try and track down records.

It would cost me a lot of money to travel to libraries & archives to look though their online records if it was only limited to

access at their institution.”

Where next?

What could a national aggregation of ‘academic’ activity data enable?

What if?

this represented a national aggregation of data gathered from the usage activity of these researchers, collected as they worked with a national aggregation of unique or rare research collections?

In humanities research it’s

all the way

What can this mean?

» Surfacing and increasing usage of hidden collections ( & demonstrating value)

» Providing new routes to discovery based on use and disciplinary contexts (not traditional classification).

» Powering ‘centrifugal searching’ and discovery through serendipity

» Enabling new, original research – academic excellence…

And we can make the data work harder to solve other problems

Explore concepts across disciplines

Discover new relationships

Speed up early stages of research

More research, less search

Our challenges…

» Effective Coordination & leadership» Developing robust business cases» Engaging researchers in their contexts» Identifying quick wins & practical ways to

add value» And also driving innovation & exploration in

resource discovery and usage

Thank you for listening