Summaries of Collection Management: Share the Experience events from 2015 – 2019 are provided below:
Collections Management: Share the Experience @ Royal Holloway 11th & 12th June 2019
This year’s Collection Management: Share the Experience event, our 5th, was extended to become a two day affair, hosted in the beautiful surroundings of Royal Holloway, University of London. Thanks to the tireless commitment of David Morgan and his colleagues at Royal Holloway library, and the many presenters who contributed, we were treated to a wide ranging, challenging and fascinating selection of presentations and workshops.
From September 2020: access to copies of some of these presentations is available on request to nbk@jisc.ac.uk
DAY 1: 11TH JUNE
Making moves – lessons from a library migration David Morgan (Royal Holloway)
Getting the balance right Catherine Parker (University of Huddersfield)
Collection categorisation break out session notes David Morgan (Royal Holloway) and Frances Machell (University of Birmingham), Plus case studies from Bristol, Leeds, York and RHUL
Collaborative collection management updates: Nick Barratt (Senate House); Jane Daniels (WHELF); Suzy Cheeke (GW4); Lorna Mitchell (SCURL); Diana Massam (Jisc)
Stock management – helping customers find their books Natasha Viner (University of Manchester)
Academic engagement – shall we get engaged? Ann Stairmand-Jackson and Graham Gamblin (Birmingham City University)
DAY 2 12TH JUNE
UKRR- from project to service Andy Appleyard (British Library)
NBK updates Diana Massam, (Jisc)
Breakout – Visualising UKRR for monographs plus padlet summary of inputs Theo Stubbs (Imperial College)
NBK Community Data Groups updates Amy Staniforth (Aberystwyth University) (presented by Jane Daniels)
Metadata Summit: report Jane Daniels (Cardiff Metropolitan University); Suzy Cheeke (University of Bristol)
University of Birmingham’s new library – 3 years on Frances Machell (University of Birmingham)
Integrating collection management Robin Armstrong-Viner (University of Kent)
Collections Management: Share the Experience @ Edinburgh 29th June 2018
The fourth national Collection Management event was hosted by the University of Edinburgh Library on 29th June in the beautiful Edinburgh sunshine! It was another day of fascinating presentations, a really thought provoking breakout session and plenty of discussion and debate. The success of these events lies as much in the connections and informal discussions between delegates as in the range of formal sessions. To me, there is definitely a sense that a professional community of practice has developed around collection management with these events as a focus.
The 5th event is already in the pipeline, probably to be held in the summer 2019, so keep an eye out for announcements on the lis-collection-mgmt@jiscmail.ac.uk mailing list.
In the meantime, the presenters at CM@ Edinburgh have kindly agreed to share their presentations below:
Hannah Mateer, University of Edinburgh Collections management at Edinburgh
Anna Grigson, LSE Making an exhibition of our shelves: engaging users with print collections
Amy O’Donohoe, Royal Holloway, University of London Data collection for collections management Plus Slide Notes
Karen Thomas, Suzy Cheeke, Jan Davey, University of Bristol Breakout session: The decision tree and collection management plus summary of themes which emerged from discussion during the session.
Ian Jennings, University of Leeds Collections management at Leeds
COLLABORATIVE COLLECTIONS MANAGEMENT:
Jill Evans, SCURL
Jane Daniels, WHELF
Matt Wigzell, White Rose
Suzy Cheeke, GW4
Dr Nick Barrett, University of London Libraries
Diana Massam, National Bibliographic Knowledgebase
Kevin Wilson, LSE How do our collections support and reflect teaching and research at LSE
Collections Management: Share the Experience @ Hull 7th September 2017
The University of Hull Library hosted a third national Collections Management event on Thursday 7th September. As UK City of Culture 2017 it was a great time to visit the city and another stimulating and lively day was had by all. Thanks to RLUK for administrative support.
The presenters have all kindly agreed to make their presentations available:
Neil Grindley & Bethan Ruddock, Jisc The National Bibliographic Knowledgebase: project update
David Morgan, Royal Holloway, University of London Project Management in Libraries
Ruth Elder, University of York Applying a collections categorisation framework at York: a pilot project at the University of York
Hannah Mateer, University of Edinburgh Collections Rationalisation at the University of Edinburgh
Vanessa McHugh, University of Manchester From here to posterity: managing low use collections at the University of Manchester
Maggie Sarjantson & Lisa McFarlane, University of Hull From Spa town to City of Culture: decommissioning a campus library
On Thursday 30th March, Michael Williams and his team opened the doors of the Bodleian Libraries Book Storage Facility in Swindon, having given members of the Collection Management community a rare opportunity to visit. Anne Worden, who visited from the University of Portsmouth, kindly agreed to us posting her report on our blog:
Visit to Bodleian Libraries Book Storage Facility, Swindon, 30/3/17
Oxford opened this facility in October 2010 as a replacement for multiple other stores, including a salt mine in Cheshire, which were becoming very expensive. It is in one corner of a 17 acre site which the university bought and they will be expanding the current warehouse over the next 4 years at the same time as building a store for the Oxford University museums.
The current capacity is 13 million items with 8.9m being stored, so about three quarters full. They “ingest” (accession) about 7,000 new items per week, making just under 400,000 each year. The conditions meet BS5454 and PD5454, with the temperature being 17.5°C (+ or – 1°C) and the humidity 52% (+ or – 5) – 15,000 sprinkler heads are in place in case of fire. Items are stored in acid free, archival quality, strong cardboard box trays.
Stock is stored on 11m high, German-engineered (no leaning forward!!), metal shelves which are 70m long with 31 narrow aisles between them. Three aisles contain a huge run of map cabinets spread over 5 floors. All other items are stored by size and most have a barcode stuck on the top left hand corner to aid quick retrieval – those that don’t have the barcode stuck onto them have the barcode on a slip of paper sticking out the top but this isn’t ideal as the barcodes get mixed up when people borrow several items like this at the same time. Six forklift trucks are used to enable 8 retrievals of stock a day between 7am and 10pm, Monday to Friday – seeing the pod of the forklift rise up 10m to get something then move forward at that height to the next retrieval was quite a sight!
They get approximately 19,500 requests each month, a figure which has increased year on year. They think the increase is due to the speed and reliability of the service – vans deliver to libraries around Oxford twice a day and if you order by 10.30am in the morning, you can have the book the same day. Unexpectedly, medium use stock has been stored there as well as low use stock, as librarians have discovered that putting copies into the store actually makes them more accessible to users in different libraries around Oxford because of the frequent delivery service.
In addition to the delivery service, they also provide a scanning service and scan about 50-60 items per week in term. The reader gets a link to a server and then has 2 weeks to access the article/chapter. The scan stays on their system for a term just in case of retrieval problems, then gets deleted. They have just dropped the price of scans from £4 to £2 in order to encourage more use of this service.
There are 22 staff working in shifts and the key contact is Michael Williams, Head of Storage and Logistics. Because they will have spare capacity for the foreseeable future, they are keen to encourage other universities to use the facility – Cambridge are currently storing their newer legal deposit collection there whilst they wait for their own store to be built. Stock for other institutions is stored on separate aisles so can’t get mixed up with the Oxford stock. Michael said that he is happy to provide price estimates based on exact requirements.
Jenny Yaacob and I came away extremely impressed by the scale and efficiency of the whole set-up. If we were to consider off-site storage for legacy items, I would certainly recommend investigating what they could offer us, as nothing we could do ourselves would match their skilled operation.
AW 31/3/17
Collections Management: Share the Experience @ Bristol 2nd February 2016
The second national Collections Management event was hosted by the University of Bristol Library, in association with Jisc, RLUK and SCONUL. It was a popular and successful event stimulating discussion and debate from delegates representing the Collections Management community.
Presenters kindly agreed to make their presentation slides available as follows:
Jo Aitkins (University of Leicester), Chloe Barnes (University of Sussex) and Anna Grigson (LSE) took part in a panel discussion following on from themes raised at the York event. Jo and Chloe produced slides on Gifts and Collection Management Policies respectively which are available here: Bristol Panel Slides.
Slides from the subsequent presentations are available as follows:
Neil Grindley, Jisc From Strategy to Solutions a National Bibliographic Knowledgebase
Frances Machell, University of Birmingham Eating the elephant: reclassification and preparation for a major library move
Laurence Bebington, University Of Aberdeen Loosening the Bounds of Copyright and Licensing: How Recent Reforms to Copyright can Facilitate Better Collection Management and Access
Collections Management: Share the Experience @ York 7th July 2015
This inaugural event, hosted by the University of York Library in association with Jisc, RLUK and SCONUL was a very successful opportunity for the Collection Management community to meet, share good practice and discuss common issues and activities.
Presenters have kindly agreed to make their presentation slides available as follows:
The Dark Art of Managing an External Store Jo Aitkins (University of Leicester)
Developing and implementing a Library Collections Policy to deliver and support ‘more’ Laura Shanahan (University of Edinburgh)
Collections analysis at University of St Andrews Helen Faulds (University of St Andrews)
Collection development or data driven content curation? Rachel Kirkwood (University of Manchester)
Collaborative Collection Management: SCURL’s experience Richard Parsons and Jill Evans (SCURL)
WHELF: Collections Management Collaboration within Wales Mark Hughes (Swansea University)
