BL/HE Task Force announcement

The British Library and the UK Higher Education sector have a mutual interest in closer strategic collaboration. Supported by the British Library Chairman, John Ashworth and the Chief Executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Sir Brian Fender, a Task Force has been set up which now embraces all UK Higher Education. Building on a history of collaborative discussion, eg between Jisc and the British Library, the Task Force aims for specific initiatives for mutual benefit, in line with the British Library's increasing strategic emphasis on collaboration to deliver its objectives.

Membership includes for the British Library: Brian Lang, Lynne Brindley, David Bradbury, Geoff Smith and Malcolm Smith, and for Higher Education Mary Auckland, Reg Carr, Lorcan Dempsey, Paul Hubbard, Mike Hopkins, Nigel Macartney, Ronald Milne, Ian Mowat, Charles Oppenheim, Malcolm Read and Alicia Wise.

The Task Force believes that strategic collaboration will bring benefit to both parties, and will allow the national higher educational needs for research, learning and outreach to be met in the most coherent and cost-effective manner possible.

To that end the BL and HE have each agreed £50,000 funding contributions to initiate a practical agenda starting with the three areas below.

The first area is that of potential mechanisms for coordinating the development of a distributed national collection of library research resources, including the need for, and feasibility of, the creation of a national body for this purpose. The study is being carried out by Margaret Wallis and Nick Moore for the Information Strategy Research Unit at the School of Information Management, University of Brighton.

The second area will be a study of the relationship between the British Library's and Higher Education libraries' objectives, leading to the development of high level performance measures of the British Library's contribution to the HE sector.

The third area will be an examination of the way in which the British Library and Higher Education inter-lending and document supply services currently inter-relate, and how the system of mutual support can be improved. There will be discussions with SCONUL, CURL, COPAC, LAMDA and others about the scope for greater collaboration.

The Task Force has also considered other matters, such as the contribution of the National Preservation Office to BL/HE collaboration, and would welcome suggestions from the HE sector of other areas where closer strategic collaboration is felt to be important.