House of Commons - Education and Skills

Select Committee on Education and Skills Fifth Report

FIFTH REPORT

The Education and Skills Committee has agreed to the following Report:

LIBRARY RESOURCES FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

1. The Education and Skills Committee took evidence on Monday 29 April 2002 from Lord Eatwell, Chairman, and Mrs Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive, British Library, Sir Howard Newby, Chief Executive, Higher Education Funding Council for England, and Sir Brian Follett, Chairman of the Research Support Libraries Group, concerning library resources for higher education. Interested parties had been invited to submit written evidence concerning this issue.[1]

2. The British Library provides the largest and most advanced interlibrary lending service in the world. In the years immediately after World War II the UK established a collection of science journals that were lent from a central location. The collection was combined with the national central library in the early seventies to create the British Library. Its document supply division at Boston Spa in Yorkshire was the direct successor to the science collection and last year it issued 2.4 million documents by interlibrary lending: one every three seconds of the working year.[2]

3. The four UK higher education funding bodies, in collaboration with the British Library and the national libraries of Wales and Scotland, established a strategic advisory group on research support libraries to advise on the development of a national strategy that would ensure UK researchers in all disciplines had access to world class information resources.[3]

The British Library

4. The British Library is funded from the vote of the Department for Culture, Media and Sports. The Library's baseline operational grantinaid in 2001-02 was £82m, to enable the Library to build, preserve and provide access to its collections in support of research, business, the wider library network and wider educational goals, through its reading rooms, exhibition galleries, educational programmes and loans to other institutions, through its remote document supply services, and through provision of information and bibliographic services.[4] We were interested to learn that "well over half of all the Library's activities are devoted to the support of higher education research".[5]

5. Lord Eatwell told us that the British Library had a central role in providing UK universities with excellent research provision.[6] A survey by the American Association of Research Libraries had ranked the British Library as 'best in the world', marginally ahead of Harvard and Yale.[7] The next UK library to appear in the survey was Cambridge University Library, ranked 65th. The British Library had a collection covering 150,000 periodicals, 55,000 of which were current. We were told that a good university library would be expected to collect fewer than 10,000 periodicals.[8] Sir Brian Follett commented that without the provision of resources at the British Library, university libraries would have to increase their expenditure on books and periodicals from approximately £150 million a year to around £400 million a year.[9]

The Research Support Libraries Group

6. The four UK higher education funding bodies, in collaboration with the British Library and the national libraries of Wales and Scotland, established the Research Support Libraries Group [RSLG] in July 2001.[10] The RSLG was chaired by Sir Brian. The RSLG was charged with producing advice on the development of a national strategy for research library provision.[11] Lord Eatwell told us that "the development of such a strategy is essential to ensure that UK researchers in all disciplines have access to world class information services".[12]

7. The RSLG was created to address the concern that, although the UK had excellent research libraries, it would become increasingly difficult to maintain these standards in the future. The RSLG believed that the rising costs and growing volume of library resources had developed to the point where no individual library could realistically aim to collect and hold all of the resources that its researcher users required. Research libraries were being forced to pursue these resources externally. The RSLG did not believe that the current aggregated national research collection could continue to meet research libraries' requirements in its present form.[13]

8. The RSLG would comment on the development of the world wide web, which had fundamentally altered the technology available for delivering research information to library customers in the last decade. The Internet presented a great opportunity to researchers by allowing all universities to be linked by a worldclass network.[14]

9. The RSLG was established to advise on a national response to the above issues, and to develop strategies to ensure that UK researchers continue to have access to the full range of worldclass information resources.[15] Sir Brian highlighted three issues threatening the current resource structure:

10. Sir Brian told us that of the 300 million books on the shelves of university libraries and the British Library, some (particularly science periodicals) would have a life span of no more than a decade. He emphasised the importance of developing long term legacy plans.[17]

The vision of the RSLG

11. The RSLG belived that new strategies were required to ensure that the needs of UK researchers continued to be adequately met. It suggested that the UK had an opportunity to become a major player in determining the new research information landscape: "if we do nothing, the risks are that the body of material available in the UK will become less well matched to researcher needs, and that we shall increasingly be forced to rely on other countries or on purely commercial vendors for our research information resources".[18]

12. The RSLG believed that UK should pursue the vision of a national electronic research library (NERL). The RSLG told us that researchers required rapid and easy access to the broadest possible range of resources. Researchers needed to be assured of the quality of the information they had access to. The RSLG expected the volume of online research resources to grow exponentially within the next few years, creating a requirement for sophisticated new tools to navigate the electronic environment. The RSLG believed that, if the present situation continued, research resources would be of variable quality, and would be difficult to locate and access quickly. The RSLG told us that "we should be working now to develop mechanisms to give cohesion and direction to decisions on what research material is made available online...to safeguard its security... and to encourage new channels of scholarly communication".[19]

13. Sir Brian was excited at the prospect of developing a national electronic research library. He told us of the work he and Mrs Brindley had undertaken in the development of the Joint Information Systems Committee [JISC].[20] He said that the JISC should grow into a virtual organisation. Sir Brian was concerned that the majority of undergraduates used only "primitive search engines" to search the Internet.[21] Sir Brian was also keen to develop a national strategy for the electronic preservation of printed resources.[22]

14. The RSLG wanted to extend collaboration between research libraries. We were informed that no academic library could fully meet its users' needs without external assistance, although there was still scope for reducing duplication in holdings of less heavily used materials.[23] The RSLG told us that almost all research libraries in the UK were already involved in some form of bilateral or multilateral collaborative activity, such as local or regional schemes for sharing access to print resources. The Group believed that these activities could profitably be extended into new areas, such as planned collaborative acquisition and retention policies, to improve the coverage of the aggregated collection.[24] The RSLG suggested that the localised activities should be supplemented by more collaboration at national level, for example in producing a single national online catalogue of research resources.[25]

15. Sir Brian told us that similar issues were affecting many countries. He expected that the RSLG would develop a strategy which would enable the UK to keep its research libraries at the centre of research support.[26] Improving cooperation between libraries would be crucial. Sir Brian suggested that resource spending could be optimised by reducing the duplication of books between libraries.[27] Where small numbers of institutions were collecting specialised material within a specific area, "it really would make a lot of sense if there were some strategic overview in that particular area".[28]

16. Sir Howard Newby, Chairman of the Higher Education Funding Council for England [HEFCE], commented that the RSLG had been charged to develop a more robust mechanism for co-ordination between university research libraries to reduce the duplication of collections and journals: "there is also an issue about whether very specialist centres need to be created and sustained serving a national remit or whether we just leave it to the laissez-faire of the university individual collecting policies. We rather suspect we should not leave it to individual collection policies in individual universities".[29]

17. The RSLG stated that the print holdings of the British Library, and the services of its Document Supply Centre, were essential to the success of research in many disciplines. We were told that the availability of a very wide range of serial publications, delivered to the researcher's desktop, through the British Library, was equalled by no other national collection. The RSLG believed that this enabled higher education institutions in the UK to collect fewer journals than their peers in other countries and yet maintain parity in research standards.[30]

18. The RSLG emphasised the continuing role for librarians and other information professionals. Despite the growth of online resources, no evidence had been presented to the Group to suggest any slackening in the flow of printed material. The RSLG suggested that the increased dependence on online resources would create a new role for information professionals to help researchers to keep up to date with what was available in their field in all media.[31]

19. The RSLG consulted a range of researchers who would be using the research service in the next two decades, to determine what was expected of the developing service. Sir Brian told us that there was a great need to maximise access for all researchers in the UK to excellent resources. The RSLG consulted only postgraduate researchers within the public sector.[32]

The Research Support Library Group report

20. Sir Brian told us that interim RSLG findings suggested that its report would include a:

"package of recommendations that will sustain the research library structure. One will be library cooperation... The second will be a number of comments about sustaining Boston Spa and the document supply centre. That is particularly a problem over the next few years. Whereas the shift comes from paper to electronics the underlying stability of Boston Spa, which has been there for a generation now, has been shaken and is being shaken as we speak, and we cannot allow that to get us down at the present stage".[

21. It is expected that the RSLG report will be published in September or October 2002. The RSLG report will be sent to the boards of the four funding councils, in Northern Ireland, Wales, England and Scotland, and to the Board of the British Library and to the National Libraries of Wales and of Scotland, where there will be discussions over the autumn and into the new year, at the end of which the stakeholders will have to decide which of the recommendations they will take forward as the new strategy.[34] Sir Brian believed that the financial implications of the Group's recommendations could largely be met from current library budgets.[35]

22. Sir Brian was concerned that some recommendations would require the collaboration of government departments and the devolved administrations: "there is a fair amount of trickiness right now if you come up with any kind of suggestion which tends to pull and join together government. I think we would all sign up to the fact that we wish to see more joined-up government but it is rather difficult to deliver it on the ground".[36]

23. We welcome the collaborative approach which the British Library and the funding councils have used in developing co-operation to provide UK researchers from all disciplines access to world class information resources. We are concerned that no national strategy currently exists to enable researchers to have access to such resources. We welcome the role of the RSLG in the development of an appropriate strategy. We look to the British Library and the funding councils to implement the appropriate recommendations of the RSLG report.

Previous Reports

24. We noted that the RSLG had not undertaken a radically different approach in investigating library resources for higher education than its predecessor bodies. In 1993 the Follett Report addressed many of these issues and the Anderson Report[37] specifically focussed on a national and regional strategy for library provision for researchers. HEFCE told us that the Report in 1993 of the Joint Funding Councils' Libraries Review Group (the "Follett Report")[38] was concerned with the impact on HE libraries of the twin pressures of rising student numbers and IT. The recommendations of the Report led to a number of special initiatives to support higher education libraries including: the JISC e-Lib programme to develop the electronic information environment, the first national licensing scheme for electronic journals and capital grants (totalling £45 million) to a number of higher education institutions to expand their library buildings with particular emphasis on accommodating more readers.[39] Sir Brian was pleased with the progress made since his Report in 1993. He told us that "we have to be extremely careful. We have one per cent of the world's turnover doing four per cent of the research and we have had about ten per cent of the citations so in many ways we have done well. I am not complacent, I am not negative".[40]

25. We are concerned that the previous studies of library provision for higher education did not result in the implementation of a national strategy. We recommend that the British Library, the UK funding bodies and the DCMS should now work together to develop a national strategy.

The British Library and the DfES

26. Lord Eatwell told us that "well over half of all the Library's activities are devoted to the support of higher education research".[41] Mrs Brindley commented that the DfES was not consulted regarding the work of the British Library or the RSLG, as the sponsoring department of the British Library was the Department for Culture, Media and Sport [DCMS]. Lord Eatwell told us that the British Library was a "big chunk" of the DCMS's budget.[42]

27. Lord Eatwell told us that of the three million documents consulted in the Library's Reading Rooms each year, 75 per cent were science or technology-based;[43] for example GlaxoSmithKline were one of the British Library's biggest customers.[44] The British Library supported education and trade through the provision of high quality information resources. Lord Eatwell commented that "we have got 50 per cent higher education, 25 per cent DTI, and that only leaves a rather small proportion of our activity which falls under the general issues of access to culture and cultural exhibitions and all these sorts of things that we do".[45]

28. Sir Howard told us that HEFCE regarded "the work of the British Library as an absolutely key and crucial resource for higher education and further education now and even more so in the future".[46] Sir Howard described the British Library as: "a resource that is absolutely crucial [for] meeting both our commitment to sustain the UK's position as a leading world nation in research and [for meeting] our commitment to widen access to higher education". Sir Howard expressed his concern that the DCMS was "a Department which, with the best will in the world, may have other priorities".[47]

29. We recognise that over fifty per cent of the British Library's activities are devoted to supporting higher education research. We are concerned that the Department for Education and Skills cannot support the activities of the British Library. Extra resources would have a disproportionally positive effect within the higher education establishment. We recommend that the Department for Education and Skills should work with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to ensure that research resources for higher education institutions are sufficiently funded.

Best Practice

30. Mrs Brindley told us that the British Library was 'very aware' of the work of other national libraries and was always keen to adopt 'best practice' from wherever it was displayed. She told us that there were "imaginative things happening in the whole digital domain in, for example, Australia, which we are learning from. They are archiving aspects of the web, that is of value for research, and there are other European countries which have got digital legal deposit".[48] Mrs Brindley believed that the British Library was leading the field in terms of more traditional library roles. She was interested in the work of the Library of Congress, which had massive programmes of digitisation. Mrs Brindley believed that digitisation was an excellent method for extending access to resources.[49]

31. The British Library was seen by Mrs Brindley to be one of the more entrepreneurial national libraries, due to its business model and the generation of £25 million additional income a year.[50]

World Class Investment

32. Lord Eatwell expressed his concern about maintaining the British Library as a market leader. He told us that: "funding that resource is a challenge, it is a challenge both to the country as a whole, to the taxpayer, as to whether they feel that is an appropriate thing to fund, and secondly it is a challenge to us at the Library to manage our resources efficiently and to ensure that we really get value for money in a period of very rapid change in this process: the development of digital collections as well as the growth of paper collections".[51]

33. Mrs Brindley emphasised the British Library's commitment to providing a world class service for the British taxpayer before providing services to other countries. We noted that a third of the British Library's revenue was generated overseas. She told us that the Library was facing an increasingly competitive international market.[52]

Electronic resources

34. Lord Eatwell told us that the British Library was "at a very awkward stage historically at the moment because, whilst digital materials are coming on line and we have to think about collecting digital materials, it is also true that more books and papers and things are being published than ever before. Digital platforms have not taken over from books as yet. They may do in 15 or 20 years' time or whatever; we may see a switch-over, but at the moment both are rising and so we need to sustain collections both of books and papers and newspapers and all the other things that we have traditionally collected, plus start to develop digital collections".[53]

35. Mrs Brindley told us that electronic publishers and journals were not required to deposit their material with the UK copyright libraries, unlike publishers of printed material.[54]

Digitisation

36. Mrs Brindley told us that the British Library had begun digitising its resources and material. She told us that the funding used to do this had not been taken from the grant-in -aid. As an example she cited "one Lottery funded project to make available 100,000 images across a whole digital collection, so it is a major project".[55] Mrs Brindley said that the British Library had also put forward a spending review bid to "digitise about four million pages of newspapers which we believe to be both an enormous resource for research but a fantastic resource for school children and for lifelong learners".[56]

37. Lord Eatwell remarked that the British Library's developing strategy for digitising paper collections, to be placed on the web, was "fabulously expensive".[57] The digitisation of the journals at the Boston Spa site would cost approximately £4 billion.[58] Mrs Brindley told us that the British Library was 'very nervous' about funding digitisation from their core grant as the Library's top priority was to "keep the purchasing power for our collections for wider benefit". She told us that if the Library was given funding they would focus on digitising parts of their collection which could be "re-purposed right across that spectrum of our user groups".[59]

38. We believe that the digitisation of resources at the British Library is key to maintaining the Library's world class position and will help widen access to valuable resources. We recommend that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport should give its support to the Library's plans for digitisation and that this priority should be reflected in the allocation of funding following the 2002 spending review.

Library acquisition issues

39. HEFCE told us that too many higher education institutions [HEIs] had been unable to increase library acquisition budgets in line with increasing prices of books and journals. These price changes were often above general inflation and were indirectly exacerbated by the high costs of subscriptions to online research journals.[60]

40. The British Library believed that additional funding was essential for sustaining acquisitions. They calculated the level of price inflation as currently 8 per cent for journals, 5 per cent for electronic materials and 4 per cent for books. The British Library believed that annual uplifts above inflation in the Library acquisitions budget were required to sustain the quality of its collections.[61] As mentioned previously,[62] Sir Brian told us: "it is a complicated business as to why the inflation rate in this whole area of periodicals, particularly in science and medicine, has exceeded the average. I think in the end the publishers have a very strong market position. It is an absolute necessity for a science enterprise that it publishes its material in first line journals, peer review journals".[63]

41. Sir Brian said: "as far as the publication of pieces of scientific research are concerned, let us take that, the material is provided to the publishers free of charge. The author receives no royalty for offering the material. Indeed, he or she will actually buy back the material at well above cost so that in that sense the publisher is in a situation where they are receiving the material free. They are receiving most of the editorial work on it free, so that in those senses it is a very good business proposition for them. They are naturally very concerned about how all this will play out over the next 20 years, not least of course because for them if they get the equation wrong they will go bankrupt. The situation is very different for books. There of course the author retains the copyright and receives a royalty, and so there is a very different business relationship between the author and the kind of thing that we are referring to in the new scientific periodicals".[64]

42. Sir Brian told us that resolving the increasing prices of journals would be a difficult task. The UK did not have a significant share of the world market and was unable to influence the publishers of scientific journals: "about eight years ago the funding council in Bristol did indeed begin a series of national site licence agreements with a number of publishers and some of those have held very well".[65] Mrs Brindley told us that the British Library had entered into very robust negotiations with publishers over licence arrangements. She said that "to some extent they are in a monopolistic position because you cannot easily substitute the materials supplied by one publisher by those of another. That limits the kind of bargaining space".[66]

43. We asked the witnesses if they had considered using the Internet to undermine the the monopoly of power that publishers of scientific journals had achieved. Sir Howard told us "there is a posting of an article on the web which is not peer reviewed but.... there are a number of other reasons, not least of which are ones of status enhancement, as to why there is still quite a drive to see something published in the conventional manner in a high prestige journal".[67]

44. We suggest that the proposed British Library electronic research library would have sufficient status to offer a real alternative to scientists wishing to publish their research. We look to the British Library to explore ways in which the proposed electronic research library could be developed.

Research resources at higher education institutions

45. Figures returned by higher education institutions [HEIs] to the Higher Education Statistics Agency indicated that in 19992000 HEIs in England spent some £385 million on central libraries and information services. This included library staff costs and purchases of publications (the latter being about a third of the total); but it also included the costs of certain information services not provided through the library, and excludes buildingsrelated costs. This represented 3.8 per cent of the institutions' total spending from all funding sources. HEIs engaged in research activity of varying kinds, and to varying degrees, in accordance with their individual mission and the availability of funding. The pattern of provision of libraries and other information resources in support of research was consequently more diverse than for teaching and learning. Older institutions with a long history of research activity would tend to have built up larger and more diverse research collections than those which were established more recently or where research represents a smaller part of their overall academic activity.[68]

46. The Follett Report[69] concluded that "provision of library facilities in support of research across the newly unified higher education sector is very uneven. Even within the former Universities Funding Council (UFC) sector, there was always considerable variation in how far institutional libraries provided support for researchers in depth and across a full range of disciplines. There is a considerable concentration of research-related library facilities in certain institutions, and use of these facilities by researchers from outside these institutions is common. Increasing selectivity in the distribution of research funding by the councils, coupled with rapid rates of inflation in the price of periodicals and books, mean that it is not feasible to expect every institution to be able to provide for all the research related needs of those working within it".[70]

47. We noted that the Joint Academic Network [JANET] a private, government-funded network for education and research, provided a world class network facility prior to the Internet. All further and higher education institutions and the Research Councils are connected to JANET, which was designed to provide its users with the most uptodate technologies and services.[71] Sir Howard said "because JANET[72] is run as a national system and because the agreements we have, including our strategic alliance with the British Library, are nationally based, then we can say with our hand on our heart that as far as researchers are concerned, staff in any British higher education institution, broadly speaking, have equality of access to online materials".[73] Sir Howard commented that although JANET was originally designed for researchers, undergraduates were now its main users. At present JANET was a library-based resource, Sir Howard recognised that this would have to change to allow students access in other locations.[74]

48. We noted that institutions with less established collections should be able to access what they need on a 24 hour basis either from the Boston Spa document supply service or from a local institution with better resources.[75] Mrs Brindley told us that the British Library was becoming part of "quite an integrated referral scheme".[76] We also noted that the resources available to researchers through the British Library were not always well publicised through public libraries.[77]

49. Sir Howard told us of HEFCE's work to provide new universities with additional learning resources: "we have invested ...disproportionately heavily in the learning resources in new universities and they have actually responded in quite innovative ways. ... [choosing to] invest in learning centres which combine access, to books and periodicals and... online access to electronic materials".[78]

Research Support Libraries Programme

50. The UK-wide Research Support Libraries Programme [RSLP], funded by the four higher education funding bodies, was designed specifically to support and improve library provision for research in higher education, with a strong focus on promoting collaboration between the providers. The programme has distributed grants of almost £30m over four years. The programme is scheduled to end in the summer of 2002.[79]

51. The UKwide programme was developed to implement key proposals from the Anderson Report.[80] A total of £12.2m has been awarded to projects under the first two strands, and £5 million per year was distributed under the access strand. The Council had agreed to continue the latter payments in 200203 pending the outcome of RSLG.[81]

52. Sir Brian told us that "the great bulk of that money is being distributed in a complicated formula to ensure that all bona fide researchers in universities have free access to all other university research libraries. So the money goes differentially to institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge or the London School of Economics or Manchester where there are a very large number of physical visitors coming to do research in those libraries. Certainly it is likely that something along those lines should be continued; it widens access".[82]

Institutional funding and RAE

53. Sir Brian told us that British research enterprise over the last ten years, particularly in the universities, had been an unsung success story: "I think the Government has understood that and is starting to invest".[83] Sir Brian believed that no other country had produced a better public research enterprise.[84] He reminded us that in Britain a large proportion of research funding was allocated to less than 20 per cent of the universities within the UK. He believed that this was a useful strategy which allowed research resources to reach a "critical mass".[85] Sir Brian acknowledged that the concentration of funding given to 20 per cent of the universities in the UK was potentially damaging and could prevent other universities excelling in their research.[86]

54. The Research Assessment Exercise [RAE] assesses the quality of research in all higher education institutions in the UK through a process of peer review. It is conducted on behalf of the four funding organisations in the UK. The main purpose of the RAE is to produce ratings of research quality which will be used by the UK higher education funding bodies to determine the main grant for research to institutions they fund.[87]

55. Sir Howard told us that the concentration of funding on a fifth of universities was the outcome of many separate decisions made by assessment panels. He acknowledged that resources had not been available to fully recognise (and therefore fully fund) the considerable improvements made by the majority of universities in the research assessment exercise.[88] Sir Howard emphasised the value of robust collaborations between institutions which would ensure that researchers would not be disadvantaged as a direct result of the funding allocation to their university.[89]

Access target and research demands

56. Mrs Brindley believed that the DfES target to increase participation in higher education[90] would result in libraries and institutions "increasingly inevitably using more of their resources on supporting teaching and learning simply to create enough or buy enough material for the mass requirements of teaching".[91] Sir Howard believed that "there is just the danger, which I hope we have foreseen by setting up [Sir] Brian's group, that while we are being quite single mindedly focused on achieving that target at the funding council through the institutions, we could simply inadvertently not take account of the knock-on effects on research resources in our libraries".[92]

57. Sir Howard commented that achieving the target of increasing participation in higher education by 2010 to 50 per cent of people between 18 and 30, would mean a 35 per cent expansion in student numbers in England by 2010. That would require an additional 15,000 to 17,000 academic staff. Sir Howard added "many of those will be users certainly of research resources in the British Library".[93] Sir Howard commented that the distribution of the additional 350,000 students would require the development of "higher education in parts of the country where local provision is not always there".[94] Sir Howard told us of the developments in higher education facilities which had seen higher education and further education facilities located on the same site, saving costs and lowering barriers between HE and FE.[95]

58. Sir Howard admitted that the existing HEFCE funding methodology did not sufficiently recognise the changes to the role of libraries which were taking place as a result of the expansion of student numbers and the erosion of the divide between HE and FE.[96] He told us that "we know the additional 362,000 students we need to attract to hit our target are likely to require more teaching and learning support than most of those who are already in the sector now and that has implications indeed for libraries and for the more generalised learning support".[97] Sir Howard noted that the implications of meeting the target would require additional funding. He told us that the review was currently awaiting the outcome of the spending review before attempting to reflect the additional costs in the funding allocation given to universities.[98]

Conclusion

59. We are proud that the British Library is recognised as a world leader and we pay tribute to its work in providing research resources for higher education and for enterprise. We look forward to the Report of the Research Support Libraries Group and we expect to see a positive response to its proposals from the Government, from the funding councils and from the British Library itself.

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