The Jisc Collection Management Community Advisory Board met on 3rd February. Chris Awre stepped down from the Board in January and was thanked for his valuable contributions to our work. Alan Danskin, Metadata Standards Manager at the British Library was welcomed as a new member whose metadata expertise will be highly valued.
Following discussion at the previous meeting, the Board approved a revised remit to be reflected in a new name and updated Terms of Reference. This came about following proposals to change the focus of the oversight provided by the Library Services Advisory Group (LSAG), which will be reconstituted as a new group in due course. The Library Hub Community Advisory Board (LHCAB) will advise Jisc on the development of all aspects of Library Hub services for the library community, supporting collection lifecycle management including discovery, metadata and related areas as well as collection management. The changes will be published following final approval from Liam Earney, Executive Director of Jisc Digital Resources and members of the strategy group. Following this, additional new members with appropriate expertise will be invited to join the Board over the coming months.
Service updates: various items were discussed, including progress with data loads to the NBK. The target of 150 institutions loaded to Discover by the end of January 2020 was reached; the next target is 175 institutions by the end of July [this target has subsequently been revised to 165 as a result of the COVID crisis]). Board members agreed to support advocacy work with institutions who have not engaged to date. The RLUK cataloguing database has now been switched off, an important milestone in enabling the old machines to be decommissioned. Most users are now using the Cataloguing service. Various Discover interface enhancements have been developed and usage of Compare is significantly higher than the old CCM Tools service, with 50% of usage from new institutions.
An outline of the priorities for year 4 of the partnership with OCLC was provided, including discussions about WorldCat data syncing and data sources for the Cataloguing service.
Stakeholder engagement: a new type of event was piloted with colleagues from WHELF in November, which will be rolled out to other groups in 2020. It was agreed that the previously convened NBK Community Groups will be disbanded, with members invited to engage with the new area of activity developing under the banner of Plan M.
The next phase of activity for Plan M will be an economic modelling project to be undertaken by a consultancy. The Board reviewed the outline for this work providing valuable comments and feedback. As the key governance body for this work, the Board will maintain oversight between meetings via email and online discussion as required.
The Board’s statement about standard coding of retention information was revised following further discussion and approved. Endorsement will be sought from the RLUK and SCONUL boards, then comment will be invited from the community before a final version is published. Several Board members’ institutions will be early adopters of the protocol. Uptake will be monitored and reviewed at the next meeting with a view to developing new functionality in Compare once the level of uptake can provide meaningful insights.
Following a review of collaborative initiatives and their implications for the community, the meeting closed. The next meeting will take place on 1st July 2020.
