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