On Tuesday 26th April, Neil Grindley (Director of Content and Discovery) and Rosie Hare (Services Coordinator, Library Hub) were invited to speak at one of UKSG’s regular, free webinars. The webinar was entitled: ‘Plan M: the road ahead’ and was designed to be a strategic overview of the next phases of the Plan M project between 2022-2026.
After the launch of the Transitional National Metadata Agreement between Jisc and OCLC at the end of February 2022, Jisc have been working on the next phases of Plan M and how we anticipate this project developing over the next few years.
Through some internal strategy workshops earlier this year, we looked at the original aims and outcomes of the Plan M project and developed four new ‘strands’ to the project, which we will be using for the next few years to undertake the work required to make Plan M a success. These four strands are:
- Data issues and quality.
- Engagement with publishers and third parties – where do we (Jisc) position ourselves within the ecosystem?
- Open Access Monographs and UKRI policy.
- Understanding workflows – case studies into acquisitions workflows in our member libraries.
From our existing work on Plan M, from 2019 up to 2022, we know that many of our member libraries are supportive of the overall aims of the project, and we have had many libraries already sign up to the Transitional National Metadata Agreement between Jisc and OCLC. This agreement is only the first step in our engagement with third party organisations, as we try to tie together different stakeholders within the bibliographic metadata ecosystem.
The four strands mentioned above are very much part of a ‘living document’ that will evolve over the next few years, but we see a key part of this work involving continuing dialogue with Jisc member libraries to gain a detailed understanding of critical workflows within their acquisitions and cataloguing teams, so that Jisc’s engagement with relevant third party stakeholders is directly informed by what our members need and would like to develop.
All of this work will also be underpinned by our Library Hub team working on data quality issues and exploring opportunities around linked data and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion work in the sector, informed and guided by our Library Hub Community Advisory Board and our Library Strategy Advisory Group. The work on Open Access Monographs is also part of a wider Jisc project, as well as Jisc involvement in other external projects such as COPIM.
To watch a recording of the webinar, please visit the event page on UKSG’s website. If you have any questions about Plan M and the work surrounding it, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at nbk@jisc.ac.uk.
