United Kingdom

&quot;Lancaster University is a global university with an innovative approach to digital transformation. At the heart of the discussions in early 2020 were what it meant to be a truly global research intensive university while maintaining the campus experience that Lancaster is know for. Allied to this, the Library, following the recruitment of a new Library Director, was in the process of creating a new library vision to support the university in its endeavours to ensure it worked as partner not just service provider. Then the pandemic hit.

Led by Professor Simon Guy, Pro-Vice-Chancellor Global and by Andrew Barker, Library Director, this session will present a portrait of our ambitions for the future of the Lancaster University and its library post-pandemic, how we ensure that we have a transformative impact in the communities in which we operate while being a truly global research intensive university .&quot;

UKSG Annual Conference 2021

University Futures, Library Futures: Lessons from the Pandemic for Reimagining the Future of our Institutions

university library future digital campus

The UKSG Annual Conference is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries.

UKSG Annual Conference 2025

"Lancaster University is a global university with an innovative approach to digital transformation. At the heart of the discussions in early 2020 were what it meant to be a truly global research intensive university while maintaining the campus experience that Lancaster is know for. Allied to this, the Library, following the recruitment of a new Library Director, was in the process of creating a new library vision to support the university in its endeavours to ensure it worked as partner not just service provider. Then the pandemic hit.

Led by Professor Simon Guy, Pro-Vice-Chancellor Global and by Andrew Barker, Library Director, this session will present a portrait of our ambitions for the future of the Lancaster University and its library post-pandemic, how we ensure that we have a transformative impact in the communities in which we operate while being a truly global research intensive university ."

technical paper

The UKSG Annual Conference and Exhibition 2021 will be held online for the first time. The event is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts a large number of delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries. The conference combines high-quality plenary presentations, lightning talks and breakout sessions with virtual social events and a major online trade exhibition.



 UKSG Annual Conference is a major event in the scholarly communications calendar which attracts a large number of delegates each year from around the world - librarians, publishers, content providers, consultants and intermediaries. 

Our break out session will build on the UKSG Insights article “The view from Salford: perspectives on scholarly communications from a research-informed university” (http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.511). Published in May 2020, this opinion piece received a significant amount of interest online and has had nearly 1500 views and downloads.

We will demonstrate the analysis model developed by Salford to evaluate transformative agreements and our framework for engaging with researchers. Financial outlay must contribute towards our goal of an open, equitable, sustainable and scholar led research environment and serve the needs of Salford, both in research terms and value for money. This interactive session will also provide other institutions the opportunity to share their experiences of assessing transformative agreements.

The session will be co delivered by Wendy Taylor (Scholarly Communications Librarian) and Helen Monagle (Electronic Resources Manager) who will discuss how our agile Collections and Research teams are working together to share knowledge and expertise and how our size and structure enables us to work flexibly and creatively.


A model approach Salford's frameworks for assessing transformative read and publish deals

Transitional deals have changed the way academic libraries manage their subscription and open access processes, budgets, communications, as well as how they make decisions on big deals. At the University of Liverpool, the Open Access and Subscriptions teams are working in a new way to manage all aspects of transitional deals. 

Our presentation will share our approach to evaluating deals, including an outline of a set of principles that has been developed to guide our evaluation and decision-making processes. We will also share how we communicate about deals internally to the library and externally to researchers, and how we manage them financially between two traditionally separate budgets as 'read' fees decrease and 'publish' fees increase. The presentation will include template examples of documentation developed in-house to support newly developed processes as we transition to this new and collaborative way of working.

Evaluation and Collaboration: Moving to a new decision-making approach in the transitional deals landscape

This presentation revolves around the Bibsam Consortiums work in improving the transformative agreements.

It will cover the topics of author journeys, administration agreements, Open access uptake, and future price models.

Working with transformative agreements at the Bibsam Consortia

Publication by publication, university libraries are pivotal to making open access (OA) happen. They are hubs of expertise within their institutions, managing repositories and gold OA funds and offering untiring advocacy and training. However, libraries are service providers. Their researcher clients may not be as immersed in the web of OA options and policy and tools, but librarians have to serve their scholarly communications enterprise, not vice versa. OA cannot flourish as a crusade just of libraries. 

This paper uses UKRI’s 2020 policy consultation as a lens to examine the relationship between library and research communities in a Russell Group university choosing between future OA trajectories. The choice to take a researcher-led approach revealed the current reality of OA in the institution. Few academic authors can avoid OA altogether now, but many still limit their attention to overcoming local obstacles to publishing specific outputs. How to distil legitimate and coherent feedback when researcher voices diverge, or manifest surface-level or one-sided engagement with a tangle of intricate challenges? What agency should opinions of library staff exert in this process? Should our institution lead or follow, and who decides?

Who speaks for the University on open access?

The COVID19 pandemic accelerated the move of many aspects of library provision online across the UK (and elsewhere). Libraries already offered a high proportion of resources in digital formats and both took advantage of free access to ebooks, as well as investing in increased digital content through a variety of packages and solutions. Many individual libraries explored large scale eTextbook provision (with the support of Jisc and SCONUL who sought feedback on the acceptability of publisher and aggregator models). In this session I will reflect on large scale etextbook provision (based on my experience at two institutions which have run this type of scheme) with consideration to questions of: 
- student and academic staff perspectives and the use of analytics 
- relevance of textbook for all subjects and alternatives 
- changing models of pricing and provision 
- emerging issues and potential future directions

Learning from eTextbooks: looking back and thinking forwards

A case study is presented of efforts to coordinate a university-wide approach to etextbooks including library guidance for academics, a tool for keeping track of etextbooks in use across the university and some examples of best practise. These include working with procurement, academic support unit managers and other key stakeholders to ensure that a joined-up approach is taken, etextbook value for money is properly assessed and alternatives to etextbook provision are given due consideration.

Etextbooks: coordinating a university-wide approach with no additional budget

In 2019 the University of Leicester library developed a new leisure reading collection. It was important to collection was representative of the incredible range of diverse voices of students, staff and the local population. In order to include more works by underrepresented voices, the library launched the ‘Represent’ campaign and asked users to recommend titles from underrepresented voices for the library to purchase and add to their collections. The ‘Represent’ campaign has since developed to work with student volunteers to look at diversity within subject reading lists as well as creating opportunities to discuss issues around representation more broadly.

Represent: Building diverse library collections in collaboration with library users

Overview of CONNECT, a free Identity Management Service for the industry that's designed to reduce anonymous site traffic and make users more inclined to engage with publishers and societies, for a stronger and more valuable scholarly community.

How Simplifying a Site's User Registration and Login Delivers More 'Known' Visitors

An overview of the relaunched Library Hub Cataloguing service, its benefits, utitlites, and how to access the service.

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A model approach Salford's frameworks for assessing transformative read and publish deals

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