Please find below a summary of the Jisc Collection Management Community Advisory Board (CMCAB) meeting held on 3rd February 2017. We have received some positive responses from the community about these updates, but welcome your comments and suggestions for improvements.
The Board welcomed another new member, Dawn Holland from the University of Hull. The time and enthusiasm members give to the Board is much appreciated.
- CCM Tools & Copac Updates
University of Sydney Pilot Project: A project framework document has been developed and access will be provided to members of the team in Sydney very shortly. They will use the CCM Tools over the next few months and deliver a report at the end of the summer. This will enable us to investigate the potential for CCM Tools to provide international services in the future.
A number of community events have taken place or are in the pipeline: a valuable and popular way to promote CCM Tools to colleagues. Diana has offered to run local events for any institutions interested in hosting them which has received an excellent response to date.
Service Developments: the new ‘My Library Groups’ feature has been popular but caused some confusion because consolidated records display all holdings, not just those libraries in the group. The Board agreed that the display should be adjusted to include selected libraries only with the option to display all holdings. Work on developing new search format filters and search history management is underway. A storage limit for search histories may need to be introduced to manage storage requirements. The Board reiterated the requirement to be able to share searches with other members of the same institution but also potentially named collaborators. The service development survey run over the last few months has confirmed our existing priorities. Diana will write a separate blog post about this.
Shibboleth Access: this enables any member of an institution to access CCM Tools. The Board did not consider this a problem as long as this is documented in the Help pages.
An update on new data loads is available on the Copac website. The team are working with 3 pilot libraries from the M25 consortium to test a streamlined process for adding new data to Copac. Some concern was expressed about the lack of data updates from some institutions. The resulting lack of currency can have serious implications for collection management decisions in particular. This is a perennial problem as the Copac team are dependent on institutions sending their data in a timely fashion. If the team could directly ‘pull’ data from contributors, this would remove the need for action by institutions. It is hoped that this sort of development could be part of the enhancements delivered by the National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK). In addition the NBK will be able to automatically synch data with OCLC’s WorldCat if individual libraries require it. This will remove the need for two separate data loading workflows for the two services.
- Community Engagement
Diana will appeal for practitioners who may be interested in submitting a joint paper to the forthcoming NAG Conference about use of CCM Tools in acquisitions, which is a good fit this year.
Colleagues at Bodleian Libraries are happy to arrange an event touring their book storage facility in Swindon. It is hoped this will happen towards the end of March. The Board expressed great interest and appreciation for this.
It has been more difficult to find a suitable date for a larger collection management event along the lines of the previous Bristol and York events. The Board are keen for this to go ahead, ideally in Scotland, so we will pursue this.
- GreenGlass Update
Board members from Sheffield, Leeds and York provided an update on their collection management work with GreenGlass. The outputs provided need further analysis including an in depth survey of the levels of overlap between different collections. These were significantly different to expected levels and it is hoped that a deeper examination of the data will shed light on this.
- York categorisation project
Ruth Elder provided an update on a recent pilot project at York to categorise a branch library collection of items according to a defined status: heritage, self-renewing, legacy and finite (the ‘Leeds categorisations’). Draft criteria were drawn up to allocate categories following extensive discussion, and 34,000 items were tagged. The aim of the project was to establish a framework and methodology which can be used for future projects. This was very successful and could potentially be rolled out to the main library at some point in the future. The Board expressed significant interest in this work and discussed how such additional data might be incorporated into the CCM Tools if it becomes more widespread.
A report providing recommendations around the addition of preservation data to bibliographic metadata was produced by Michael Emly, previously a member of the CCM Board and provides more context for discussion in this area.
- National Bibliographic Knowledgebase
Neil reported that the contract between OCLC and Jisc, to develop the National Bibliographic Knowledgebase has been signed after some delays. It was confirmed that the NBK will be an entirely separate database to WorldCat. Data will only flow to WorldCat according to criteria set by contributing libraries and Jisc have confirmed that there is no perpetual licence to that data.
The first 3 years of the project, costing just over £1 million, will be funded largely by HEFCE capital funding. The service will be developed in 12 month blocks delivering alpha and beta phases followed by service delivery after year 3. Years 4, 5 and 6 of the project will be a ‘business as usual’ phase with costs to be confirmed as roles and responsibilities are agreed.
Jisc will retain ownership of the NBK project as a community initiative and will be in control of governance. The Board expressed support for this approach. The team at Jisc (including the newly appointed NBK project manager, Bethan Ruddock) will focus on: service direction; project management; community engagement; first level support to community; quality assurance/enhancement (i.e. using Copac expertise in data deduplication and consolidation) plus development of value added services, which could include a cataloguing tool. OCLC will be more focussed on data loading and operations, developing a strategy for pilot libraries to start loading.
- UKRR Update
The latest UKRR consultation forms part of work to establish a new business model which will be required when HEFCE funding ceases at the end of Phase 3. A working group of practitioners will be looking into models including local checking of holdings via SUNCAT.
The UKRR feasibility study for monographs is underway and the consultants will produce a report around April/May. They have been careful to liaise with Jisc to avoid covering the same ground as the National Monograph Strategy.
- Terms of Reference.
The Board reviews its terms of reference on an annual basis. Some of the other Jisc governance groups in the area of Library management and data will be joined together to form a new Library Management and Bibliographic Services advisory group. It was agreed that the work of the CMCAB is still vital in this new context and that the existing terms of reference were still valid. Jisc are very supportive of the CMCAB and value its input as we move forward.
The next Board meeting will be on 29th June 2017.
