Workshop and briefing sessions descriptions

We are running a series of workshops and briefings to reflect the 'Shifting boundaries' conference theme. These will be run over two days, with the opportunity to attend one session on Wednesday afternoon and another on Thursday morning. Please note that two sessions, the national e-book observatory and the Open access publishing workshops are not repeated

New directions in leadership
Workshop led by Anne Burrows, Leadership Foundation Associate

Anne Burrows has a thorough knowledge of the current leadership landscape and will concentrate on new approaches and ideas that >directors and managers will need to address. This workshop will not explore the skills that a new generation of leaders might need but what new approaches are being taken in various sectors to grow leadership skills such as Schein's work on career anchors.

Anne will ask pose the following questions;

• What is the skill set that leaders are likely to need in a shifting HE environment?
• What do we think are the current gaps in acquiring and deploying those skills
• How do we position ourselves as services to meet that challenge
• What tools, techniques, best practice are out there to help us achieve this?

Delegates will be invited to share their experiences and/ or depending on those experiences to explore the issue of skills and the potential contribution that some of these approaches might make to their work.

Knowledge Management and the HE librarian: opportunity or threat?
Workshop led by Hilary Johnson, Director of Information Services, University of Northampton and Sue McKnight, Director Libraries and Knowledge Resources, Nottingham Trent University

"Knowledge Management is not so much the management of tangible assets such as data or information, but the active management and support of expertise" Blair (2002)

"…knowledge management is the art of creating value from an organization’s knowledge assets" Townley (2001)
A workshop to explore the impact of the concept of KM on the context and role of the academic information services manager

• Do academic libraries 'manage' knowledge?
• What more could be done to assist our institutions to 'create value from information assets'?
• How can you as a manager promote a KM approach – in your own service, and in your institution?

New markets, new students, new support structures
Workshop led by Janice Bell, University of Central England, Stephanie Holliday, Birmingham College of Food, Tourism and Creative Studies, Irene Ordidge, University of Wolverhampton and Chris Porter, Newman College

The session offers an insight into some tried and tested models for involving Library Services in widening participation initiatives. We will briefly consider four case studies:

'Sleeping between the bookshelves' at the University of Wolverhampton. Inviting young teenagers to spend the night in the library and participate in university style workshops.

Skills development for bridging the further education higher education gap at the Birmingham College of Food, Tourism and Creative Studies

Information skills Masterclasses for 14-16 year olds at University of Central England

Developing support for Foundation Degrees and Work-based Learning

Participants will then have the opportunity to exchange ideas of good practice. The outcome of the session will be an understanding of the breadth of ways to contribute to widening participation within our institutions.


UK Research reserve
Workshop led by Nicola Wright, Imperial College

Nicola will bring us up to date on the first phase of the UKResearch Reserve project, funded by higher education councils, which addresses the ‘co-ordinated retention’ principle of journals. SCONUL will be acting as the central co-ordinating body. Nicola will explore the issues raised so far in the project and the prospects for its long term development - for example, it may be extended to books. This is an opportunity for SCONUL to contribute to the market intelligence and to influence future phases.
http://www.curl.ac.uk/projects/CollaborativeStorage/Home.htm


Book digitisation programmes
Briefing session led by Ronald Milne, The British Library

Drawing on his experience at the Bodleian and now at The British Library, Ronald will share his first-hand impressions of 'boutique' and mass digitisation programmes, such as those being undertaken by Google and Microsoft. What are the strategic challenges and the practicalities of undertaking a mass digitisation programme? What might the digitisation and indexing of millions of works mean for university researchers and the intellectually curious more generally? How do we manage the impact of such programmes in the context of our organisations? Ronald will explore these and other themes in this briefing session.


Virtual research environment
Briefing session led by Brian Clifford, University of Leeds and Martin Lewis, University of Sheffield

As the process, practice and nature of research in universities changes, what changes will be required of the university library in supporting these activities? Will the services and support provided need to change to meet new needs and demands? What will happen to the role of the subject/research librarian? What new skills might be needed by staff? These are the issues being considered by the CURL Research Support Task Force and the Joint CURL/SCONUL e-Research Group. This briefing by Brian Clifford, Deputy University Librarian, University of Leeds and Martin Lewis, Director of Library Services & University Librarian, University of Sheffield, Chairs of the respective groups, will provide an overview of the work plans for both groups and an opportunity for participants to comment on the issues under consideration.


The national e-book observatory (Wednesday only)
Briefing session led by Hazel Woodward, Cranfield University

Following a recent e-book platform request, Hazel would like to brief us on the National E-Books Observatory Project. Launched in response to the recent 'Feasibility Study on the Acquisition of e-Books by HE Libraries and the Role of JISC' report, to which many of you kindly responded, the project will assess impacts, observe behaviours and develop new models to stimulate the UK higher education e-books market. The JISC project aims to fund and license, for two years only, a collection of e-books that are highly relevant to UK higher education taught course students in four disciplines and evaluate the use of the e-books through deep log analysis. Knowledge acquired during the project will be shared with publishers, aggregators and libraries to help encourage an e-books market that has appropriate business and licensing models.

This briefing session is a valuable opportunity for those grappling with the provision of core reading list e-books and forms part of the community consultation. Our involvement and expertise will be essential in evaluating the titles in order to create a priority list of core content in each of the four subject areas; business and management studies; engineering; medicine (excluding mental health or nursing); media studies.

A quick survey of the membership revealed the top e-book platforms that are currently being used within HE are NetLibrary, Safari, Dawsons EBL, MyiLibrary and Ebrary and this list will be provided to the potential bidders in the publishing industry to encourage them to make the e-books available on the platforms that institutions are utilising. Ultimately the project website will provide links to e-book projects internationally and within the UK as well as information on recent articles in the field.


Open access publishing (Thursday only)
Briefing session led by Mark Patterson, Public Library of Science and Steve Hall, Blackwell Publishing

We are all keen to engage with the complexity of the changes in scholarly communication, particularly as they impact on our strategies and services. To help us focus on the issues and implications for publishers, libraries and scholarly communication in general, Steve Hall, representing the commercial publishing side and Mark Patterson associated with Open Access will lead the debate. Hopefully at the end, we can look beyond journal prices and all agree on the bigger picture and the shape of scholarly communication and its dissemination.