This was the last session of the day and by now I think we were all starting to feel a bit weary! Some library campers had a break from the pitched sessions and had a knit/chat session at the end of the day. I carried on and went to this session about challenges that we’re facing in academic libraries and whether we can learn anything from other sectors.I’ve picked out some of the things that stood out for me, apologies if I’ve missed a load of stuff!
Fees, fees, fees
There is anxiety surrounding the increase in fees coming in for 2012/2013. I am anxious about it. I don’t think the incoming students will really know why the fees have been increased. I think they will see it that they are paying up to £9,000 a year and that they will want services, spaces and support that reflects what they are paying. I don’t think they will realise that we are having to cut services and jiggle staff to meet budget requirements and why would they?
This presents a challenge for us. This year we’ve taken more students onto courses in the school I look after and I imagine that’s the same across the university, but from a library perspective we haven’t had an extension to the library or installed more PCs or anything that might help us accommodate more students. We are working within our parameters and trying to improve things where we can to create more study space, but will that be enough? Only time will tell I suppose.
Should we be working more collaboratively?
We had discussions about the pros and cons of collaborative working. For a lot of places there is an institutional objective to be more involved with the communities that they are based in, so there seems a lean towards collaborative working to meet those sorts of objective and there are advantages to service provision in some instances. However, the general feeling seemed to be that while we can learn a lot, share resources and provide services collaboratively with other information services or libraries from other sectors, we need to concentrate resources in our departments or across our sites (if we are multi site) as sometimes we don’t know which bits of our own department are doing what. Certainly at Brighton there’s a lot of collaborative work we could be doing across the central support departments and that seems to be taking shape more and more.
What about shared services from one place?
A couple of people from Worcester in the group Alison Taylor @allieblogging and Sarah Oxford @sarahbrarian spoke about what’s happening in Worcester with a library shared by the university and public. It will encompass all library services for all those different users. Logistical and operational nightmare? Who knows, but I’ve invited myself for a visit when it’s all up and running which is set for Summer 2012. I wonder if something like this could work in Brighton…
That sums up my final library camp session.
Next post will be a very behind #cpd23 things one hopefully!
Glad you’ve shared your notes from this session, sounds like it was really interesting. CILIP West Midlands will be arranging a visit to the Hive next year (hopefully once it’s kitted out but before it officially opens), so I’ll let you know when that will be in case you want to join us.