The Jisc Collection Management Community Advisory Board met on 19th October 2018. With apologies for the delay, a summary of discussions is provided below:
Board membership: Chris Awre from the University of Hull and Hannah Mateer from the University of Edinburgh were welcomed as new members of the Board.
Project and Service Updates: as of 19th October 165 institutions had agreed to participate in the NBK and are at various stages of the data ingest workflow. Some contributing institutions not previously on Copac have also been uploaded to Copac where this has been deemed useful and straightforward.
There will be a soft launch of NBK services in January/February 2019, with pilot interfaces made available for user feedback, which will then be developed over the next few months. Consultants are working with the NBK team in developing designs as part of the broader Transforming Library Support Services programme.
SUNCAT and Copac will be retired in July 2019 so that users have plenty of time to move over while old and new services run in parallel. The NBK team are working with SUNCAT staff on joint communications about the retirement of the service and are also developing a communications plan for Copac service retirement.
There is a separate sub project working on deduplication of serials data and SUNCAT functionality will be replicated to enable serials and UKRR workflows to be supported.
E-books: the NBK team are working with OCLC to investigate how their existing arrangements with e-book suppliers might be used to set up a data flow for the NBK. Next steps will then be to clarify the ‘pain points’ in dealing with e-books (identified in previous Jisc research) and how the NBK can help, while dovetailing with work from other Jisc services such as JUSP and KB+.
For the latest update on the NBK (December 2018) see the NBK blog
Data Ownership
An overview of the outputs from the consultant Ken Chad’s recently completed investigation into data licensing was provided to the Board. Ken validated the NBK’s ‘value propositions’, as developed with the NBK team, in a scored matrix based on his discussions with the community. More details about the recommendations from the report will be made available to the community in early 2019.
Community Data Groups
Reports and recommendations from the Community Data Groups were circulated to the Board. This resulted in lively discussions about data quality, authority data, the supply of library metadata and data analysis skills for librarians. Also discussed was the need for continued development of routes for community input and engagement with the NBK, for example through the creation of support mechanisms and user consultation.
An update on outcomes from the CDGs will be posted to this blog in the new year.
National Collection Management Initiatives
Following their collection overlap study, members of the White Rose Consortium (WRC) concluded that there was not enough overlap between their collections to inform decisions about withdrawals. Following a second review of the data not much has changed in respect of member collections. The team are looking into widening the group of libraries involved in a collection overlap study, with additional libraries using Greenglass. The hope is that this can then inform decisions about retention commitments. In order to be confident about such commitments an analysis needs to involve more libraries. Terms and conditions need to be agreed so that once outside the Greenglass process it is clear what a retention commitment means in practice.
UKRR recently undertook a survey into community interest in development of a UKRR model for monographs. The Board will continue to follow developments with interest. The NBK will support initiatives around collaborative collection management, including the use of retention flags and how these can be incorporated into future functionality.
The next CM@ event will be held on the 11/12th June 2019 at Royal Holloway. David Morgan is leading on plans for the event and he and his colleagues are confident in delivering an exciting two-day event. It was agreed that further discussion of the event will be postponed until the February meeting, when we will know more about the support David may need from Board members.
Date of next meetings: Thursday 14th February and Wednesday 17th July 2019.
