JISC

A report to examine the impact, in retrospect, of the JISC's eLib (Electronic libraries) programme upon the academic libraries at which it was targeted.

Executive summary

Background

The report of the Joint Funding Council's Libraries Review Group, chaired by Sir Brian Follett, was published in December 1993 was charged to:

• Investigate the future national needs for the development of library and information resources including operational and study space requirements for teaching and research in higher education institutions
• Identify ways to meet those needs

Their report contained detailed spending plans for a series of initiatives designed to promote better use of IT within academic libraries and these recommendations became the basis for the eLib programme which started in 1994 and ended in 2000. The programme was conceived as a whole and ran 59 projects in some 15 strands and, because of the collaborative nature of almost all the projects, nearly all UK HE institutions were involved.

Scope of the study

We (Duke and Jordon) were commissioned to examine the impact, in retrospect, of the JISC's eLib (Electronic libraries) programme upon the academic libraries at which it was targeted. To provide a framework for this, we asked also to undertake an examination of the changes which have taken place in academic library operations over the period since the beginning of eLib and, specifically, to undertake case studies in 10 institutions. For the purposes of this study we have considered those activities which were badged as being in the eLib programme.

We obtained the views of some 28 individuals who were either intimately involved in eLib, able to give foreign perspectives, coming from representative organisations in the library sector, or were publishers.

We also interviewed people in a variety of roles in a sample of 10 UK HE libraries, chosen to span the sector. The roles sought were Librarian, a member of Library staff, a learning technologist and a departmental librarian.

We also considered a wide range of writings on eLib and have also obtained statistics from a range of sources showing how library operations have developed over the past 40 or so years.

Conclusions

The eLib programme as a whole had significant impact on UK academic libraries by effecting a major cultural change.

It embedded skills in three key areas in libraries:

• Project orientation, including evaluation and assessment
• Risk management
• Collaboration: internal, external, and international

The programmatic nature of eLib also facilitated major culture change in three ways:

• It speeded the change
• It affected the great majority of libraries across the UK HE sector
• It developed a cadre of skilled and flexible people who stimulated others and are now going on to become the new leaders of the sector

The strands of eLib had substantial impact upon the development of the library environment in two ways:

• They were the principal route by which eLib affected members of the library community
• They provided outcomes of practical benefit:
• • Services: some 8 are now part of the JISC services, some 6 have survived at a local level and a further 6 have become independent. In total we have found 20, almost exactly a third of the number of eLib projects
  • Contributions to developments within commercial organisations, particularly to publishers and software developers
  • Developments in state-of-the-art technology, such as through CEDARS
  • Development of new thinking in areas of libraries service delivery, such as through MODELS
  • Benefits straddling a number of strands, such as HERON
  • Benefits which were essentially by-products such as the contribution to open access and institutional repositories.

  eLib as a whole had a major impact upon the JISC itself in the following ways:

  • It showed the benefits of programme-based funding initiatives
  • JISC learned much about project and programme management
  • JISC gained the confidence to expand its activities
  • A cohort of skilled and flexible professionals was developed, with understanding and experience of JISC
  • It enabled the JISC more easily to absorb other developments, such as Athens and the National Site Licence Initiative, into its activities