RLUK ICIL | Collections and Equity: Rethinking Access and Representation

Kathy has worked as a library professional in a variety of academic, school, medical, and special libraries around the world. And her research examines the dynamics that shape information access and the new and continuing inequities in the information ecosystem. She's currently a visiting postto fellow at the University of Leeds where she did her PhD in media and communication. Um and today's presentation will reflect on collections and equity by looking at some of the limitations of efforts to make collections inclusive and accessible particularly focusing on a majority world institutional repositories as a lens through which to look at current struggles to share knowledge. So without any further ado I will hand over to Kathy. Thanks Rosie and thank you RLUK for inviting me to share this working paper that considers knowledge sharing from the perspective of how knowledge can come to not be shared even within systems that prioritize inclusivity and equity. It looks through the lens of a specific initiative for knowledge sharing and institutional repository a locally controlled system that can house unique material make it accessible to the world and keep it secure into the future. and it looks within the majority world where knowledge and culture have historically been marginalized and appropriated. I will look at how a repository can operate on the ground and make visible some of the local local conditions that affect what knowledge it can share and how reliably and sustainably it can share it. H there we go. So what I'll cover is a really brief bit of background on this work, a composite case study of the majority world institutional repository and end with some reflections and implications for practice. Now my intention is not to be negative or pessimistic or to highlight deficit. Um I'm not ignoring how far we've come. I'm not minimizing the dedication of libraries and library workers. Um gaps can exist even when we're all doing the right things. So my goals today are to raise awareness of how some voices and views are not part of the conversation and continue to be excluded from our collections and how libraries and library workloads are under pressure to facilitate knowledge sharing and deliver representation, inclusivity, and access. For my own positionality, I have been the librarian at small academic and school libraries in the majority world, specifically in the Bhutan and in the Bahamas. So my perspectives and interpretations are shaped by my time and experiences there. So this case study is based on international fieldwork that I conducted within and adjacent to libraries in three countries. The Bahamas and Bhutan, two places I've lived and worked before, and Botswana, which within this research was a new place to me, and I have heard the jokes that I only chose countries that start with a B. Um, I did the field work between May 2022 and April 2023 and I had to structure it around changing travel and social restrictions of the COVID pandemic. This time frame also coincides with another disruptive event, the introduction of chat GPT in November 2022. So, it is completely by accident situated temporally at the origin point of some of the disruptions we currently face. And I suppose that's called getting lucky. I used traditional ethographic methods. Um, I did participant observation for nine weeks across nine different libraries and qualitative interviews with informants who included library workers and library patrons. This case study is a composite that I constructed from authentic examples that I directly observed during fieldwork or were recounted to me by informants. I chose these examples to depict the everyday forces and material conditions that libraries confront that shape what they have the capacity to do and that create gaps in what we can find and know. The librarian who manages the repository, who I call Ja, is a composite character drawn from testimony shared by multiple librarian informants. Quotations from these sources are indicated in red font on the slides. So the context for the repository is it is a project of the university's academic library. GIA and the library's administration lobbyed for its creation and they believe it's an important project. They are working on this amid recent cuts to the library budget. To describe the library's financial conditions, Ja said, "The budget does not always cover everything we want or need." Under this reduced budget, the library has no funds for acquiring print materials and has reduced funds for electronic resources and has had to cut some subscription databases. The library is also under financial pressure from a different angle. It's being asked not only to spend less, but to earn. The university asked all departments to think about ways it could generate revenue. Ja said that the institution was asked to come up with some initiatives to bring money into the institution. The library building had a flood years ago and some of the book collection was damaged. So there's awareness that there is some risk to the library's materials and that they need to protect the unique knowledge resources within their own collection. Repository platform Ja built it using a globally popular free open- source system. This was a long process that the library completed in-house. Ja noted that there are service providers that can host and help you with the whole process, but their prices were too high, so we decided to do it ourselves. It took almost two years to build. Giant configured the system herself, and she learned to use it mostly through trial and error. She goes back to fix things like configuration settings and metadata when she discovers a problem. The system is hosted locally on the university's own server, but the server is not located in the library. library. It is in the technology department which is in another building on campus. So the library doesn't have control over or even really easy easy access to the server on which the repository depends. More on that in a minute. So Gia is the one librarian responsible for this project. She is very eager but she has no previous experience with the repository or with this particular open source system. She said she did not do even basic training. She thinks that her institution did not account for or provide training because administrators assumed it wouldn't be necessary. Ja said that when software is free, they administrators feel it's easy to use. It's just a thing we can handle. So Ja's take suggests a technosolutionist assumption by administrators that mistakes a piece of technology for a working system and that underestimates and undervalues the work that people do and the skills required to do it. There have been a few training opportunities Jai could have attended, but there were barriers to her participation. There was a workshop in another town, but the institution had no funds to pay the cost for her to travel to the event. Her options were to self-fund or to not attend, and she chose not to attend. to teach herself what she needs to know. Gia looks for opportunities that are asynchronous and that are available to her at no cost so that she can engage with them for free and in what she calls her free time, which is often outside work hours. She sees this as being resourceful and saving the institution money. She started training herself by consulting the systems user manual, and she has a good sense of humor about the limitations of what she's been able to learn that way. She laughs when she says, "Some things we had to figure out ourselves because the manuals were not working for us." When the manual doesn't work, she can go to the online community of fellow system users who share solutions and troubleshoot problems. But what Jai often does is she finds and watches a video. She says she just learned through YouTube. In other words, she focuses her professional skill development through a commercial platform where serious academic lectures and goofy home videos intermingle and that measures its own success not by whether Gaia learned what she went there to learn but by whether she kept watching. For Gaia, developing needed professional and technical skills must be pursued as a personal activity and potentially at her own expense. In Ja's country, there are frequent power outages, and every time the power goes out, the server goes down, and the repository's contents go offline. When power is restored, Ja has to call someone in that other building to ask them to reboot the server. Now, rebooting is an easy fix. They just have to push a button, but somebody has to be present over there to do it. If the power outage happens on a weekend, when that office is unstaffed, the library, as Ja said, has to wait for Monday. That means all the library platforms will be down unless those guys get phoned to come in and reboot. So deciding to do it themselves and taking what was for them the more affordable option of hosting their own server means that the repository itself and the knowledge it shares become inaccessible randomly and unpredictably and for uncertain lengths of time. repository content. GIA started with materials that were born digital and that the library has ready access to such as university reports and with open access materials from within the university community that don't have copyright restrictions on their distribution. The university has a policy mandating that faculty members deposit their works and JIA does solicit their submissions but faculty have been a bit slow to comply despite the existence of the policy and JA's reminders. Gia is occasionally asked why an institutional report or faculty work isn't in the repository and she reminds them that she can only add what she has copies of. She said, "I only have it if you give it to me." At the moment, the repository's content under represents the faculty work that an institutional repository is intended to preserve and to share. Gia has a book scanner on her desk that she uses to digitize print materials. Now, having it there helps with efficiency because she doesn't even have to leave her desk, but that doesn't mean digitization is fast, despite what people seem to expect. Ja said that people think that digitization can just happen in 5 minutes. Like, you just do it. But that's not how true digitization works. Scanning is labor intensive. It takes time and care to do it well and to make digital copies that meet standards for quality, durability, and discoverability. If you don't take care and pay attention, she says, you miss pages. Jia estimates that she can digitize one print thesis from the library's collection per week. She would like to produce more digital copies more quickly, but it is not easy for her to find the time. Digitization requires her to put other work aside. There are companies set up to do this and they could outsource digitization to one of them, but the library doesn't have funds to pay a third party. So like hosting the server and setting up the system, they do this work in house. The library has text and audio visual materials that are still awaiting digitization. They have a large collection of donated historical photos that live in filing cabinets. She says, "We have all these photos here. This is our history. History and photos. That is one of the things we haven't started digitizing yet." There was also a donation of audio and video cassettes in obsolete consumer and professional formats that the library has no means to even play or copy. The library collection has layers of print and analog materials that are even beyond the scope of what the repository would include, but that give us hints of other knowledge sources that are hard to see and to discover. There are shelves of local print publications that are not cataloged. They need original cataloging, but that work requires specific skill that not every library has. The library has shelves of bound historical newspapers and has for decades maintained a file of clipped newspaper articles arranged by subject to create a rudimentary subject index. These are in place of a newspaper database because local and regional newspapers are under represented in digital form. These copies and clippings contain news and history that may not be available or index anywhere. The library has cut most of its print journals but a lot of the regional journals are not in electronic format. So, the library maintains a collection of print back volumes. The library has some print books written and self-published by local authors. These hint at a wide ecosystem of self-publishing by local authors who pay for a print run and distribute the copies by hand to local bookstores. These books are not available through the traditional library distribution chain and may not even appear through any of the visibil visibility channels such as a sales catalog or a book review. Now the image there is of a flyer I encountered on a university campus. It promotes services to support self-publishing. This suggests that there is an underground economy of some scale that has emerged around this channel for knowledge production. It's sort of like the metaphor of the iceberg. What is visible is only a small percentage of the operations and services that exist below the surface. These are all evidence of sources of knowledge that are not easily shared and not even easy to know exist to be looked for. So this case depicts barriers and gaps in knowledge sharing that are not easy to see. Knowledge is still held in non-digital formats not yet digitized and may not be digitized for a long time. There is ongoing production of knowledge in print formats whether newspaper, journal or self-published book. This is testimony to the continuing relevance of print formats in contrast to assumptions that print is obsolete. It depicts libraries with shrinking budgets trying to do more with less. knowledge is not shared because there is not sufficient material resources and policy attention dedicated to sharing it. It depicts human labor vaguely workloaded, underrecognized, and largely undervalued amid expectations that technology does the work and makes everything easy and fast. Knowledge sharing has a workload attached to it that many institutions don't recognize. Library staff absorb this work under increasingly contain constrained financial conditions. It also depicts knowledge sharing is uneven. It is shaped by random factors such as what is easy to digitize, which faculty members comply with policy and follow through with depositing their works and whether the server is even up. Knowledge that is shared may be from elite institutions that can afford to pay to outsource digitization or to have their server hosted somewhere not subject to frequent power outages. So implications for practice. One implication involves the media literacy interventions that we do with the public and with library patrons um where we cultivate critical and thoughtful practice and can build recognition that some knowledge and voices are still excluded from our collections. These interventions can disrupt technosolutionary assumptions that everything is online and that in the digital era all the world's knowledge is available instantly and at your fingertips. Some knowledge will take time to share. You may even have to wait in an era that valorizes speed and paints waiting as failure. Perhaps we should align this with slow movements for scholarship, teaching, and librarianship. Now, I do want to acknowledge attention here because this is kind of advocating for more teaching and more intermediation, which is also more work in a time of declining funding and stretch staff. Media literacy interventions are not easy or inexpensive to organize and assure on the ground. Libraries often only get the one shot. I am reluctant to advocate for what is ultimately an unfunded mandate and to ask the librarians take more work onto an already full plate. There are implications for collaboration, how we can share the work and do it together and not just do it ourselves. Librarians are good at collaborating and we have created many formal cooperative structures. We can also do more informal collaboration to support sustainable knowledge sharing and capacity building. One thing we can collaboratively think about is durable alternatives so that knowledge isn't housed only on an unstable server and intermittently unavailable. Knowledge sharing needs backup systems. I'm thinking here about locks of copies keeps us safe and how that tries to prevent single points failure like when Ja can't get the server rebooted over the weekend. And I've been thinking a lot about like shadow libraries like SciHub which are very resilient and resist attempts to terminate them. Um there's also implications for communication to find knowledge hidden from view and to build collaborations for sharing. We need to reach out to actual people to build human networks and to leverage whom we know. To reach people in these countries I lived in, you needed to use non-official communication channels that are the easiest and least expensive ways to contact people and share information. A lot of commerce is organized over Instagram and Facebook. Many people prefer that you contact them via WhatsApp rather than via phone or email which have different costs and technological demands. Now I confess that I try to resist social media and the extractive platforms with business practices and ethics that I oppose. But all my friends and colleagues are on WhatsApp. So if we want to network and communicate, we have to be where people are. Um oh my time is up. Thank you. I did want to show my references. I hate it when people scroll past the references really fast. So, thank you. >> Thank you very much, Kathy. That was fantastic. And I've got a few questions I want to come back to uh later, but we'll now um move on to Karen's talk. So, Karen, if you want to start prepping your slides. Uh Karen Jackson has worked in academic libraries for nearly 30 years and is currently the uh research and academic support manager at the University of Warick and has been there since 2017. presentation today is going to ask how we make the case for inclusive collection building in the current financial climate. Something I think lots of us are thinking about. So I'll hand over to Karen now. >> Um and yes, thank you um Kathy that was a really interesting talk and I think there's quite a lot of synergy um with what we're going to talk about today. Um so I want to talk about really is um I suppose a series of kind of challenges. I don't think um no spoiler alert I don't imagine that um there's a there's an answer to this as such but I wanted to talk through some of those kind of um the tensions that we're grappling with in terms of you know the institutional priority and the drive for more inclusive collections more inclusive education um and the equally uh pressing drive associated with tight financial budgets um so what I wanted to talk through to start off with is is the kind of context that we're in and I'm I'm guessing this is a familiar context for for for most of you. Um so within our institution um inclusive education is a high strategic priority for the university. It's part of the education strategy. Um and it's also driven by uh student expectations. You know, students want to see more inclusive education, more inclusive collections. They want to see their identities, their histories, their perspectives reflected in our collections. And we are um an institution built 1960s. Our legacy print collection very much reflects that history, which is not always very inclusive. Um and that decolonizing and has become a real strategic priority for us. But sitting alongside of that um and the need and the the wishing to to grow and broaden out our collections is the increasing budget pressure. So again along with other institutions I am sure our budgets are under tight scrutiny and pressure. they are shrinking rather than growing. And we are increasingly use quantitative I want to say simplistic potentially quantitative metrics such as usage data and cost per use to drive decision- making to drive down some of our costs. Um and this is creating attention because the materials that may be more inclusive that may be broader may not always score quite so well in those traditional metrics. And so how do we make the case to retain or to add or to develop our collections in those ways? So really what I want to do today is to set out I suppose the the key wicked problem that I think we're all up against but also and to talk through some of the things that we're doing at Warick that I think are helping us to to make that case and to to keep the uh agenda and to um alive and to keep that progress being made. But also I think what will be really useful will be the discussion at the end because I'd really like to hear what others are doing and how you're getting on with it. So the first thing that we um have done really at Warick is is thinking about our own policy and strategy. So this year uh we are updating our collections policy um to make it broader and to set out you know the way that we manage and the way that we want to develop our collection strategically. [snorts] And one of the key strategic drivers embedded within that policy is the development of more inclusive um collections. And it's really important because what this does is it surfaces the need for inclusivity and to grow collections in this way as a strategic priority and it it raises its profile at institutional level. So the the collections policy is going through the formal committee structure and I believe will be signed off by Senate um sometime this month. And and what that does is it gives a shared ownership across the institution of the need to develop more diverse and more decolonized collections. And it gives it a legitimacy and an institutional buyin. Um that means that when we're coming back to maybe have some of those difficult conversations at institutional level, we have those strategic priorities that we have as a shared goal and a shared ownership. Um and so that's been I think very important for us to kind of have that clear statement of intent. Um and then the the bit that we are now looking to work on is is what we're calling the kind of oper operationalization document that will be uh we'll set out how we're going to do that and that will similarly uh go through our academic community for for for approval and so working on the policy and and building connections within the institution I think are very important for for us because it creates that shared that shared ownership. So [snorts] um the university has an inclusive education strategy and inclusive educations team and so working with them to develop this this policy is is I think important for us and then on a more practical level um collections are no good you know if nobody can find them. So, it's really not enough to acquire the resources. They need to be visible. They need to be usable and and our students need to to understand where they are. So, the way that we've gone about this um we've created a lib guide. We've created a specialist lib guide on decolonization and the library which really highlights some of our more diverse and represent representative resources. It talks about um uh how to access them. We've broken it down by region and so that's a really easy single point where we can direct students, teachers, researchers to find out more and some of those broader more diverse collections we're also weaving in to individual subject li guides that we've got. So that's that's our um one of the ways that we're trying to raise the profile of of our more diverse collections. We're also working with academics on their reading lists. So, um, one of the key ways, again, you will all know this, one of the key ways of getting students and users to engage with resources is to put them on a reading list and, and students will engage with their essential readings. So, we're working with academics to embed some of these material in our reading lists. And through [snorts] the lib guides, we're highlighting where there is really good practice and where there are some really interesting reading lists. And we've also curated our own reading list for teachers and practitioners who are wanting to make their teaching more diverse. Some pointers at the places they can look, some of the key databases where they can find those more diverse voices to include. Again, we embed uh more inclusive research methods into our information research skills training, which is an opportunity to introduce students right at the outset to more critical perspectives around knowledge production, bias, and representation. Um, and I think this really ties in with what what Kathy was saying around the kind of institutional structural uh barriers that there are to some of these inclusive things and introducing students to those and and how to get underneath uh the the and broaden out their research is is something that we that we that we focus on in our teaching. And we try to highlight good practice again to students where there are modules and where there are reading lists with with really good and inclusive um content. We've also done some work on our subject headings and metadata. Again, making sure that the collections that we do have are really visible and really discoverable and that we're using the correct and and and most upto-date subject headings. Again, like many of you, we use Library of Congress, so we're limited to some extent, but we can at least work through and make sure the metadata is there and the subject headings are up to date to make sure that everything we do have is discoverable and not and not buried. Um, you know, some of the smaller publishers, things like that. And then in the curating of our collections, um, the stark reality is that that, you know, budgets are tight. So we're making a real effort to f focus on open uh resources, open access materials uh which we can access and share for free. Um and this has two benefits to it. Firstly, we save on on money on budget but also they are open and they're genuinely open. So when we're working for example with schools and six forms they're things that we can share um with those visitors to the library and that they can go away and they can continue to work with. So whilst to some extent it's a pragmatic response to uh tight budgets, there is also an ethical and philosophical benefit to trying to as far as possible to promote, prioritize and curate open resources and make them discoverable to our users. Um and I think we're starting to try and think more critically about how we measure um that value for money. So the use of traditional met metrics and and the the request that perhaps things may you know may be proposed for cancellation because they're not being so heavily used is a real and genuine challenge for us because a lot of this material will never be the kind of high use high volume you know business source premier type thing. It's not going to compete with that. So, how do we alternatively measure that value for money? And it goes right back to what I was saying at the beginning about policy and a statement of intent. And so, we're looking at how can we broaden that definition of value to include things like representation and and gap filling, also curriculum relevance and long-term impact. So again going back to what I was saying about uh making institutional connections and and working with our academics to to identify those things which are going to support that more inclusive teaching um and and to kind of to build that perhaps broader definition. I definitely don't think we've got there. Um, I definitely think we are still very reliant on those quantitative metrics and that will always drive a lot of our decision- making. [snorts] But through the use of policy and through working with our academics, we're at least starting to build some of those cases to push back and to say, well, you know, this is a unique resource. This is the value that it has that perhaps sits beyond that that cost per use or that that, you know, number of uses. And it's really important for us always to cocreate. So we have a very open door um and we invite students and staff to suggest materials for inclusion. We have regular campaigns on building our collection to make it more more inclusive. and we work with students to co-create some reading lists on particular topics or particular regional regions in order to try and increase I suppose play the game on the other side and increase use of the resources that may be a little bit more niche from smaller publishers a little bit less uh highprofile and so working with all of those things I think we're trying to have a different convers conversation about what value a particular resource might bring to our collection. So, absolutely no answers there. I don't think um I'm hoping that that I'm going to learn something from what you've all got to say. But I think what I why I wanted to kind of talk to you all today was really to think about that context that we're in of of the tension between the the institutions drive for inclusivity, diversity, broadening of our collections alongside the real financial pressures that we're in. And how do we change that conversation? How can we perhaps together come up with different metrics that we can put alongside to challenge some of those more quantitative measures which can make some of those smaller or more diverse resources fall victim to the kind of numbers game if you like. So apologies that I don't offer any answers but I'm really looking forward to the discussion that we're going to have and I will stop there stop sharing and over to you. Thank you very much everybody. >> Many thanks Karen that was amazing and yeah really interesting to kind of hear what you have been doing and and some big questions at the end. So yeah we'll I think we'll come back to those. Can I invite Kathy to come back uh on camera on screen and we will start our Q&A. Um so we've got a couple of questions to kick us off whilst you're all still having a chance to think and digest. Um but yes, please do put your questions into the Q&A box and we will come to them. Um if I start with a question for Kathy, can you tell us a little bit more about the self-publishing sort of that you were discussing and how that can be a vehicle for local knowledge sharing guess communities that are often cut out of more traditional forms of knowledge sharing. >> It was one of the most interesting things I found in my work. I knew there was a lot of self-publishing happening in the Bahamas and Bhutan having lived there. But I was surprised when I went back to look at it how much of it is happening in print because you know in the US, UK, EU, it's mostly ebooks. You can get it done through Amazon really easily and everybody assumes that's how it's happening. But in these countries, you don't have access to those those platforms and everybody's doing it in print. Um, so they go like to a little local print shop because there's no local publishing industry really there. So if you want to get your book out, you go to a local print shop, you just buy a print run and you go like bookshop to bookshop with your books in hand trying to get them consigned there. So, I ended up talking to self-published authors and bookshops who take those books and get them on the shelves and to libraries about how would you get the book into your into your collection. And there was a whole lot of stuff about how hard it is for those authors to get their books to meet the standards that a commercial book would meet. So, there's kind of like a stigmatization. It's very skeptical about these books. And the librarian kind of asked me um where's the quality assurance in this process? Like, how do I know this is a good book to publish because it hasn't been validated by a publisher. So, there's a whole lot of difficulty. there's no place for these authors to go. So, the only place they can go is also kind of stigmatized and treated skeptically and there's a whole bunch of work attached because a publisher will do the designing and the editing and the promoting and the distributing for you and they have to do all of this work themselves. So, they're taking on all this work and they're taking all this risk because they have to buy the print run themselves and then they have to go try to get the money out of the bookshops later. And then I talked to some authors who well I have an international book contract but they're a little skeptical that they're getting their royalties from the international and they don't know what recourse they have because they're just some little author and the international publisher has lawyers. So it was just really interesting the way it's happening and the way nobody knows it's happening because those books don't show up anywhere. You have to go to a bookshop and like I took I one of my photos is like a picture of just a bookshop with all the self-published books on it that don't show up anywhere. No one would know they even exist if they're not if they're not in a library catalog because a library could have cataloged that they had original cataloging. It's it's a it's a circle. >> Yeah. Interesting. And I guess that like um as well if it is in the library catalog there's then a responsibility on the library to handle that responsibly because that's um you know that that that provides visibility that the author might not be expecting from them >> which means somebody has to be there who can do the original cataloging which is definitely um not a given in a lot of countries. I mean who who even teaches that skill anymore? Do library schools even teach that skill? Plus a lot of these countries people haven't been to library school because there's no opportunity to go to library school. So, >> it's so interesting, isn't it? because you've got so many, you know, academics and students really hungry for that information, you know, in the kind of, you know, our big, you know, libraries with all of our resources and all of our, you know, and and and you know, there's this kind of really obvious gap that that there's just this kind of break and and and you can see a really easy kind of surely there must be something that could be done to kind of stitch this up together because, you know, we want the knowledge, we want the perspective, you We we you know we need that information and and it's just not it's just not connecting up is it? >> Well there are some cooperatives like African Books Collective is doing that or African Journal Online is doing that but that's for stuff that's published through actual publishers >> and it's still selective right so there's still people who don't even meet those standards to get into those cooperives >> and it's that kind [laughter] of it's that academic snobbery then isn't it? It's like, oh, is it published by a press that I know or a press that I I kind of recognize? And that's a kind of shortcut to quality. And it's it's it it's kind of unpicking all of those metrics that we've used, not only in terms of usage, but also in terms of what does a good academic resource look like, and it might not look like what it has looked like for the past hundred years, >> right? You might have you might not have the material conditions to make something that looks scar. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> So, I have a whole another research area kind of thinking about how do we actually judge what should what do we consider scholarly? What are the because the metrics don't actually accommodate people who can't make a thing that looks shiny and you know glossy. >> There's a a comment in the chat. Someone's commenting about Glasggo Zen Library doing lots of work with self-published authors which I guess is a kind of another angle on self-publishing. Um, if we move now to Karen, there's a couple of questions for you. If we start with one that is kind of similar to what I had written down as well about the sort of idea of co-creation and getting students involved in creating reading lists. Can you say a little bit more about that and if students are voluntary, if they're reimbured and what the takeup's been? >> Yeah, I can. And and actually students are incredibly enthusiastic about this. Um we we've been doing it for a number of years. In the past, students were not reimbursed and we had a little group and and they just worked on it voluntarily and we produced a giant reading list on all kinds of every kind of marginalized group and voice that we might want to cover and and they worked on it voluntarily. More recently, we have um library student partners because we we realize that actually it's it's not ideal not to pay um people for the work that they do. So we do now pay our students but a lot of the work they do on reading lists and a lot of the work they do around suggesting content they do do voluntarily and they do it kind of extracurricularly because [snorts] they're passionate about it and and it might be there's a particular topic. So there's um there are a couple of groups through the students union that we work with. So there's a group called the global south initiative which is a students union kind of group and they're kind of they produce lectures and they invite speakers and they've done a lot of work with us and they've helped us with with compiling some reading lists and then the whole decolonizing question at war was kicked off through the students union. Um and so again there's quite a lot of work through the SU that gets done. So again, there's probably ways that students get reimbursed, but but it feels like the right thing to do because the students know what that gap is and and we are a very international institution. And so we've had, you know, Chinese students in the past talk to us about the kind of things that they would like to see um ranging from scholarly but also just to the kind of um we do quite a lot around reading for well-being and so suggesting kind of novels and things that they might like to read and so that's been really powerful. Um but yes um so I think to sort of long-winded way of answering your question um by and large the students are doing it voluntarily. Um but we do pay them if we ask them specifically for something. >> Amazing that you've got students who are so engaged. That's you know lovely. >> It's great. Um and and there's a question here about um sort of someone's asked a question about how you identify items that need their records or subject headings updated. And I guess can probably also ask Kathy a similar question around the libraries you were working you were studying how did you or how are the staff there identifying the things to prioritize when you're in a very low resource context. the kind of prioritizing what goes on the repository and what you make accessible is an even more fraugh question than um the questions that we ask you that's a question for us uh in a much better resourced institution so I'm I'm curious to know how um how that looked in the context that you were studying but maybe Karen do you want to go first and talk about the subject >> I'm I'm skating on incredibly thin ice because it was done by far cleverer people than me who know how these things work but um I think we we were able to move forward because partly because we were, you know, we were using Library of Congress, we were quite out of date and we were aware that a lot of the subject headings that we were using were really legacy. So our metadata team did a kind of global piece of work to identify and pull out the subject headings and we had a lot of support from I mean the RLUK group and the the toolkit and and colleagues in RL UK have helped I'm sure and so we did a bit of a kind of global switch around for can you pull out all items that are using this very outdated subject heading and then we replace with that. Um, and again we also do, you know, a bit of work where we we try and encourage people to kind of point things out where where things look look wrong. But but I think [snorts] it kind of makes it sound better maybe than it was in that, you know, we needed to get up to date and we needed to to kind of modernize in in line with the kind of best practice. So we were kind of doing that kind of global find and replace within our discovery system to to make sure that we were doing the best we can within the the confines of what what Library of Congress subject headings are which is a whole other conversation on another day. >> Sorry for all of us come in on the kind of question about prioritizing. >> Well I wrote down haphazardly which maybe isn't the best answer. I mean sometimes, like I said, it's like the thing that's easiest to digitize. It's the thing somebody gave it to you so you have it to digitize. Or sometimes it's the faculty who are most enthusiastic. Like they'll come to the library and say, "I need X. Can you help me?" So the library prioritizes that because somebody asked because they know it's actually going to meet and it has an audience that's ready for it. If that's to be honest and having been a kind of person on the end in one of those small libraries, that's how I would do it. If you ask, I'm doing you first. >> It's the only way, isn't it? Because when you have a thousand things, what are you going to do? You're going to do the thing that it goes back to that thing about value. If someone wants it, that that is that that gives it an extra edge in terms of its value, even if it's just to that one person that's enthusiastically sending you emails saying, "Can I have this? Can I have this, please?" >> But I also want to prioritize that person because sometimes, you know, the library, you get one person and they vouch for you and now you get more people wanted to do it because they showed that it works. So before maybe they roll their eyes, oh yeah, yeah, sure. You're going to do that and then they see it happened. So I feel like that's also a way to sort of get buy in. >> Yeah. >> To start with the person who will who will vouch for you, >> say how great you were. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, definitely. Those people are worth their weight in gold. And I guess um yeah, the kind of question of value was a really interesting one, Karen, that you touched on in your presentation. And are you able to say a little bit more about how you're um balancing the kind of traditional usage metrics with this new definition of value? because I mean the traditional metrics are they're very quick to present and I think some of the things you were talking about around value are quite hard to present um at least briefly when we have busy stakeholders who we're trying to report to. So I don't know if you can say a bit more about that. >> Yeah, I think I'm going to go back to Kathy's word haphazardly. No, not haphazardly. I think it's it it's very difficult and I think that's kind of why I wanted to talk about it because you know everybody you know at senior level it is agreed it is accepted that those metrics have limitations that they um they don't give you the whole picture and yet they are the thing that we can measure. So they are the thing that we do measure and and despite all protestations you know we end up having conversations around well can we cancel this resource but this is one of our diverse databases we would never expect it to be high use yes it costs a certain amount of money so I would say um with limited but but success but we're trying very hard to to to build a kind of it's a narrative more than a metric so it's to go back and to um you know we ask our academics to uh going back to again what Kathy was saying to to express their enthusiasm for these things and to put them into their reading lists and to and to say well you know this underpins this module or this research area or this topic that I'm trying to grow and you know it's not to be foolish about it you know we know that budgets have to be met and budgets have to be squared and there are always a thousand things that we want that we can't have um and so we have to be mindful that sometimes something just isn't being used But we try and tackle it at both ends. We try and raise the usage. So we have a system here. We are you're very lucky. We're a Russell Group University. We are compared to some colleagues, we are relatively well funded. So we we have a kind of a grace year. So normally if something comes up then then we can buy a year's grace and say well look can we do some work with this? Can we do some promotion? Um can we work with our departments and then come back in 12 months and see where that usage has gone? And if it's if it's moving in the right direction, you know, we've got a bit of leverage to say, look, this is this is clearly something that with the right support is is of value to our users and our and our researchers. But but but I don't think there is an answer. And that's where I'd really like I think you know perhaps this group you building those case studies, building those kind of narratives. What are the stories that we need to tell about these more diverse resources that that will make their case and help them to hold their own against, you know, Business Source Complete and ProQuest, you know, vast database of of whatever which are easier easier to access. you know, our um acquisitions colleagues are sometimes, I think, quite relieved when, you know, we're not subscribing to the teeny tiny thing that, you know, you have to ring up a bookshop in somewhere or other and it it takes a whole lot more work to to engage with it. So, it's kind of trying to, as I think we do in libraries a lot, trying to kind of change the balance of power between ourselves and those big publishers and those metrics and tell some different stories. But it's definitely not perfect. But we've had some success at kind of retaining some of those diverse collections because they are diverse rather than because they are the highest use or the highest value. >> Can I comment on something? One of the things that came up a lot in my work when I talked to both librarians and publishers was those like the databases that have all this useful knowledge in it require support and promotion and there's very little time to do that because everybody's plate is already full. So my work is over here. This I mean I crossed the word out. I cost I had a section on opportunity cost that I end up crossing out. The opportunity cost of all this other work is I don't have time to promote and support those databases so they get low usage. So I'm told we'll cut them because there's low usage. So it's this cycle of like because I don't have any time to support and promote they won't get used. >> So I that came up from publishers and from librarians as don't actually paint the real picture. >> No. And it's in the context of you know we need to do this even more because the other thing we're doing on a on a completely different topic is you know we're talking to our particularly our students around what is a trusted source and it goes back to what you were saying a little bit about what is a scholarly resource. You know, we have students that start at Chat GTP when they want to do some research and and and what what we want to to to get across to them is that you come into the library and and what we have in our collections is curated by ourselves, by your academics, by your professors who are the experts in the field. And whether you agree or disagree with the arguments they make, these are scholarly academic resources that should be your starting point. And we have to work much harder to counter the the apparent ease with which you can just whack a little question into chattp and get a whole load of what looks like lovely sensible answers. And you know, it's so much easier, isn't it? And and so I think I think you're right about that whole promotion. You know, we shouldn't assume that our users are automatically starting with us. They're not. and and and that you know all the problems around ChhattisP and their equivalents you know it's not just them um around reinforcing all that bias that we are working so hard in our collections to counter we are working so hard to diversify and if you know if you go straight to chp all of that bias all of that historic is just reinforced there and then and so so I think there is there's more to be done even more than there used to be because it's not only do we need our students and our researchers to understand the breadth and the range of collections we have. We need them to understand that this is where you start. You start with the library because you can trust what we say. You can disagree with it. You can you can find it, you know, totally counter to the way that you want to think, but you you know that the person that's written it as thoughtful as academic is, you know, is authentic and and has a a reasonable right to say what they've said. um rather than just going out into the jungle and and seeing what comes back. So there's a whole I think that promotion thing is so important on on so many levels surfacing smaller publishers surfacing some of the more diverse resources but also just reminding people start with the library used to be much easier when it was just a door come into the library open the door and here's all the resources but you know um just reminding students that there is a virtual door which is their best place to start. >> Yeah. Yeah. much much easier for print resources in some ways. Um, we've got a couple of minutes left. Can't see any of the others in the Q&A. So, I'm going to take chair's privilege and ask Kathy a question around in your closing slide, you talked a bit about collaboration and about clocks and resilience. Um, and I wonder whether it come up in your research at all around doing this in as non-exloitative way as possible. You know, I think there's a long history of knowledge exploitation um sort of global north scholars not necessarily represent not not necessarily uh acknowledging the work and effort that has gone in from the global south and um you know and and actually it links back to what Karen was just saying a chat about chat GPT because I think there are even more concerns at the moment now that AI companies are scraping everything that they can find on the internet. So just wondering whether that kind of those relationships came up at all in your research and what the how the libraries were kind of handling this. It didn't come up explicitly but I will say that having lived for 11 years in the Bahamas and Bhutan I feel like people sub submit to a lot of this extraction because they feel like they don't have any other recourse. So I feel like part of the coloniality of the system is they don't feel they feel like well I have to use chat GBT because what else am I going to do? I have to use. So I So some of it is firm, right? Lack of anything better. So you submit to this system that you may or may not even know how it works. May or may not disagree with, but you submit to it because there's no other way for you to get it done. So I even kind of said I have to be on WhatsApp even though I it's meta and I boycott everything they do, but all my friends are there. So do I want to talk to my friends? I do. So you have to be there. And so many so many bookshops like Bhutan use Instagram as their storefront. So, if you're not on Instagram, you can't buy any books from them. And I can't even go and look at what books they have for sale as part of my research, unless I have like a secret Instagram account, which I forgot the password to, which is fine because I don't actually go on it. But, so even I have to sort of submit to these platforms. So, I I don't know if that's a good answer. I feel like the coloniality of it is you have to. There's there's no way to escape it. I don't know that people are necessarily aware that they're doing it, but there's definitely a Well, what else what else am I going to do? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not I guess totally surprising, but um yeah, it's it's when I talk to my friends, they're like, "What what do you want me to do?" I'm like, "Okay, good point. Good point. You have to you have to get things done. You have to live your life."