The latest issue of Panlibus Magazine is available to read online today.

Technology and libraries have always gone hand in hand and with the two becoming increasingly entwined, this issue offers an array of views and opinions from many prominent voices in the library technology community.

Brian Kelly from UKOLN (p6) notes that rapid technological developments, combined with the financial crisis, will transform the nature of the services provided. Brian gives his technological predictions for 2012 and describes approaches for planning for the future. Peter Kilbourn of Book Industry Communication (p4) believes that technology can be used to protect the best of the library tradition and exploit the existing network of buildings, but in a way that doesn’t put pressure on rapidly dwindling funds.

The emergence of mainstream cloud computing over the last couple of years has prompted libraries to ask how this will affect them and what benefits it will bring. Erik Mitchell, a prominent figure in the world of cloud computing in libraries, discusses its impact and offers some guidance on balancing the issues and implications when evaluating cloud for libraries (p14). We also take a look at some of the practical applications of cloud in use in libraries currently (p8).

Capita’s Additions Partners provide a wide range of technology designed to improve your library service. In this issue we have articles from 3M, introducing SIP 3.0; Edinburgh libraries and Solus, outlining how they together achieved significant growth for the virtual library; and PSP Security Protection, introducing themselves to the Panlibus readers.

Subscribe to receive your own hard-copy or online version.

Survey

Thank you to all who filled out our recent survey. The answers have all now been collated and are being analysed. One of the things that has come out so far is introducing a ‘letters to the editor’ page which I am very keen to introduce. If you would like to send a letter for publication please email me at mark.travis@capita.co.uk.

Finally, the winner of the survey prize draw is Helen Standish from Manchester Metropolitan University, who takes home a Kindle. Congratulation to Helen.

Mark Travis, Editor, Panlibus Magazine

Back in September 2010 the British Library unveiled their their thinking about priorities and aspirations for the next decade – 2020 Vision [pdf].

As the associated area of the BL web site explains:

2020 Vision is our 10-year vision, following 12 months of extensive and wide-ranging research and consultation. In today’s climate of significant technological change, it highlights what are likely to be the key trends and opportunities over the next decade, and indicates how we will develop as an organisation to increase access to the world’s knowledge base for our users.

As a major [inter-]national library and significant planet in the solar system of UK culture and heritage the BL, and it’s vision for the future and subsequent shorter-term strategy is of wide interest and relevance – not least to those working within the academic and public library communities.

In today’s conversation I bring together British Library Chief Executive, Dame Lynne Brindley, Head of Strategy and Planning at the BL, Lucie Burgess, with Ayub Khan, Head of Libraries – Strategy for Warwickshire Library & Information Service, and Library Consultant Owen Stephens.

In this fascinating conversation we hear how the BL went about the process of forming and publishing their Vision, the need for it, and how it will influence their direction over the next few years.  Owen & Ayub reflect upon what it may, or may not, mean for UK libraries for academic and public libraries and share with us their marks out of ten for the vision.

The 2020 Vision Site is also worth a visit to scan through some of the background and to view the research that underpins the vision: www.bl.uk/2020vision.

Listen:

Last Saturday morning I had the pleasure of presenting at this year’s CILIP PPRG Conference being held in the Lake District overlooking Lake Windermere. The conference theme for this year was Marketing Gold — promoting libraries using data & web technologies.

So on the final morning of the conference I gave my presentation on using technology to get the most out of your data. I discussed the use of data and database marketing in an integrated marketing strategy, and provided live demos on some of the technology we use at Talis, and how that could be beneficial for libraries to adopt. The technology that seemed to catch the eye was our email client, VerticalResponse, and how it can be used to track users’ email consumption habits.

During the other sessions, it was great to see what libraries are doing already with their data to model users/potential users and provide a marketing strategy tailored to them. Nick London from Nottinghamshire Libraries gave an extremely useful presentation discussing (amongst other things) the Mosaic geodemographic data that they have been using to profile users and feed into marketing strategy. Both Nick and I showed the VizLib Project that Leicestershire Libraries have been working on – visualising library authority usage data. Worth a look if you haven’t seen it already.

Other technologies mentioned over the conference that you may find useful to aid your library marketing were Google Analytics, Wordle, Tweetdeck, and Facebook Insights.

As an aside, congratulations to both Durham University Library and Stirling Libraries on their PPRG Marketing Excellence awards announced at the conference.

Pictures courtesy of CILIP PPRG on Flickr.

Almost halfway there, a research report authored by Holly Mercer from Texas A&M University, is an analysis of the behaviours, as opposed to the attitudes of academic librarians in relation to Open Access publishing. With the issue of Open Access, academic librarianship seems caught between the imperative of cost-saving, difficulties in effectuating change in the faculties and the need to provide a continuous service (not mentioned in this study, but an important factor in inhibiting the cancellation of journal titles or “making a stand with the publishing industry” over price rises).

With an emphasis on behaviour then, the research methodology avoids the survey approach, and instead conducts an analysis of literature published by the LIS community and indexed in the LISA abstracts database, rationalising that data in ways such as de-duplication and exclusion of non-academic librarian authors.

Early on in the report, the issue of Open Access is situated in a broader context of shifting roles and responsibilities in academic librarianship:

Bibliographers and reference librarians have become liaisons who provide expanded services to academic departments. Liaison-librarians often are responsible for discussing scholarly communication topics, such as the rising cost of scholarly journal subscriptions and open access alternatives, and are expected to advise authors to retain enough rights to their published work to use in the classroom, to share with colleagues, and to deposit in an institutional or subject repository.

Yet the report highlights significant levels of ambivalence around this new responsibility:

A 2009 study by Palmer et al. concluded librarians are generally quite supportive of scholarly communications programs including opening access to scholarship, but are nonetheless ambivalent or unsure how to discuss these topics with faculty at their institutions.

It may be that this lack of confidence is symptomatic of uncertainty across academia of the benefits of Open Access. The report discusses the low take-up of institutional repositories, and this reminded me of some qualitative research I carried out in 2008, in which a Russell Group university psychology researcher told me that the benefits of simply dumping [sic] a paper into a repository hadn’t been made clear to him. The problem goes beyond poorly rolled out repositories. It remains the case, for example, that the “certification process” (i.e. quality review) of a published article sits with the journal rather than the repository.

One of the strengths of this report is its constructive criticism of institutional repositories. Dorothea Salo is quoted as making the following very strong statement:

Repository software serves observed and stated faculty needs surrounding content creation and dissemination hardly at all.

And the report goes on to say:

The University of Rochester library investigated the discrepancy between the stated benefits of institutional repositories and the desires of faculty and found that most want to work with colleagues, as well as organise and manage their research and writing. IRs only minimally cater to these goals.

Back to the advocacy issue, a particularly valuable recommendation made in the body of this report is that if academic librarians were practitioners of open access publishing, they would find it considerably easier to evangelise to academics:

Academic librarians believe the profession should advocate for OA but few said they were supporting OA by taking action individually, such as self-archiving or amending agreements.

So the report suggests that the full power of evangelism is only released when you practise what you preach. And for this point alone, the report is valuable. Practise what you preach, and provide tools to help the congregation to follow suit. But if neither the academic librarian nor the academic in the faculty is adopting open access en masse, then there may be deeper problems not dealt with in this otherwise excellent report. So the report does provide a rare analysis of librarian behaviours around Open Access, but ultimately fails to dig down into the reasons behind the behaviours described. We need to look beyond the report, not necessarily for attitudinal factors, but for more cultural, political and economic reasons behind this resistance to change.

In this podcast, Sarah Bartlett talks with librarians from The Glasgow School of Art, recipients of the 2010 Times Higher Education Outstanding Library Team award. Catherine Nicholson, Head of Learning Resources, together with Duncan Chappell and David Buri, Academic Liaison Librarians, discuss the reasons behind the library’s success. We discuss the strengths of small teams and organisations in terms of agility and innovation.  Given that the library is serving a very narrow range of subjects (it supports three schools – Fine Art, Design and Architecture), it’s interesting to characterise the institution’s students. We hear about the strong visual orientation of students at The Glasgow School of Art, presenting the library with interesting challenges, and the development of InfosmART, a home-grown application which takes students through a series of online interactive modules to develop information literacy skills, a crucial source of support to a student body of which 11% are declared dyslexics. Small agile organisations are increasingly associated with technological innovation and the library is making use of diverse platforms such as flickr and blogger.com to remodel its service delivery, and we also talk about enterprise-level systems and the library’s plans to integrate with the VLE and the student registry system. At a time of looming spending cuts, it’s heartening to hear that resource constraints have directly led the library into a number of interesting service enhancements such as virtual enquiry desks. At The Glasgow School of Art, the library team believes overwhelmingly in the importance of personalised services, and values the opportunity that today’s technologies offer in terms of no-cost experimentation, coupled with the immediate informal feedback mechanisms of an institution with only 1,900 students.

ACRL, I am starting to feel a little bit spoilt. Having only recently praised a recent report of yours, 2010 top ten trends in academic libraries, I am once again blogging effusively about your output. This time it’s Futures thinking for academic librarians: Higher Education in 2025, and it’s very very good – well worth a read. So thank-you very much for another contribution to our collective understanding of the current climate and the options open to us.

The shape of things to come

The authors aren’t claiming to be able to see into the future – they’ve just worked to a sound methodology (as per the top ten trends) which basically consists of a thorough environment scan in the library domain and beyond, accompanied by a small survey to capture the librarian imagination. Imagination seems to be a key ingredient in this study, and that’s refreshing, and shouldn’t be problematic as long as it’s underpinned by methodological rigour, which it seems to be.

But it’s not just an academic exercise. This is fundamentally about giving decision-makers in academic libraries some pointers to help them face the challenges of today and tomorrow. The report backs up this approach with a great quotation from anthropologist Margaret Mead:

I use the term ‘open-ended’ to suggest that our future is neither predetermined nor predictable: it is, rather, something which lies in our own hands, to be shaped and moulded by the choices we make in the present time.

So what are the findings of this report?

The report has identified 26 possible scenarios for academic libraries in the year 2025, the distant horizon being justified by a need to see beyond our current woes. It impressively handles very up-to-date ideas on higher education and ponders their potential impact on academic libraries, and this adds to the value of the report. Then each scenario is positioned on a quadrant that plots impact against probability.

What I’ve done is to group what in my view were the most interesting scenarios into a number of headings, so here goes:

The future size and shape of universities

Pop-up campus – Physical campuses all but disappear with the explosive growth of online learning. Spaces pop up intermittently as needed. Probability: Medium. Impact: High.

This class brought to you by – For profit institutions lead the way with disaggregated offerings enabling students to pick best of breed. Probability – High. Impact - High.

The future student

A college degree for every citizen – a scenario that higher education becomes more popular and valued across society almost to the point of being a universal entitlement. Probability: Medium. Impact: High.

Everyone is a non-traditional student – Students blend studies with the rest of their lives, unable to fund full-time education. Personalised learning becomes the norm as students design their own learning outcomes, and are assessed on demonstrations of learning rather than “seat time”. Probability: Medium. Impact: High.

Meet the new freshman class – The digital divide widens between socially privileged students fluent in digital media, and their less tech savvy counterparts. Probability – Medium. Impact – Medium.

The size and shape of academic libraries

Out of business – The academic library loses relevance in the face of direct provision of commercial information tools and services to students and academics. Probability: Medium. Impact: High.

Scholarly communications and learning resources

Breaking the textbook monopoly – A scenario in which publishers are mandated by law to make textbooks affordable. Meanwhile academics have embraced open educational resources, and are sharing materials online. Probability: Medium. Impact: Medium.

Bridging the scholar / practitioner divide – Open Access and open peer review have become the norm for many field, facilitating agile community-based dialogue. Probability: High. Impact – High.

Academic niche networking – Near breakdown of traditional academic departments, under pressure by online networks and inter-disciplinary drivers. Probability: Low. Impact: High.

Renaissance redux – The walls of the ivory tower come tumbling down, and academics engage freely with society around knowledge problems. Probability: Medium. Impact: High.

Scholarship stultifies – Standard dissemination channels such as university presses implode, but academics continue to be rewarded for conventionally published research. Probability: High. Impact: High.

Pedagogical shifts

No need to search – Authority data is automatically inserted into our content; students are freed up from the need for information skills and can focus on synthesis, analysis and interpretation. Probability:  Medium. Impact: High.

Right here with me – Widespread use of mobile devices with location-based services transforms acquisition of learning materials, and interactions between students. Probability – High. Impact – High.

Think U – Forms of knowledge favour the graphic, schematic and visual. Psycho-emotional attributes are favoured over written communication. Probability: Low. Impact: High.

Woven learning – Learning is underpinned by interwoven subjects and multiple intelligences, and is more experience-based. Probability – Low. Impact – Medium.

In the final post of this series, I discuss the Electronic Resource Management (ERM) element of the SCONUL Shared Services Report. Electronic resource licensing and management is identified early in the report as one of the three domains for proposed shared services. For fairly obvious reasons, ERM is a high priority operational area for academic libraries. With electronic content licences identified as one of the four areas of cost under consideration, ERM is explicitly identified as the focus of the shared service initiative:

“The core shared service will be centred on ‘e-resource lifecycle and access management’ encompassing e-journals, e-books, abstracts and other digital content.”

And this is the clearest passage in terms of establishing the scope of ERM within this initiative:

In the target scenario, a shared ERM service will be used by the service provider and customer institutions to keep track of electronic information resources, supporting acquisition and management of licensed e-resources. This will include resources licensed at a UK level where all students and staff in the UK can access them, resources with a UK framework agreement where any UK institution can obtain discounted access for its staff and students with standard licenses. The system will handle the metadata for resources and machine-readable versions of all licence agreements. The ERM system will include usage statistics related to the electronic resources.

Can ERM be centralised?

This is surely the fundamental question here. The report claims that 90% of respondents either agree or strongly agree that much ERM work is repeated unnecessarily across institutions, and I see no reason to dispute that. The report somewhat boldly asserts ERM is a function that is no longer needed locally, and refers to a “community source platform”. It seems unclear to me what a community source platform is exactly. In the States around 2008 there was a ground-up initiative started at the University of Florida called Library Okra. Although sadly defunct, it argued cogently for a community-based ERM approach along the lines of cooperative cataloguing, where, say, the relationships between a journal title and a package would only have to be entered once, as would the core clauses of a licence. If this is what the authors mean by a “community source platform”, then I applaud it unreservedly.

The fundamental ERM problem

I’ve touched upon the fundamental ERM problem there, namely the disparity between the resource acquired by the library (e.g. a journal package) and the resource that is the focus of the user’s attention (e.g. the journal title or the article). By adopting a “cooperative cataloguing” approach, we solve one part of the problem and ensure that it’s always updated in a timely fashion, but part of the reason why the first generation of ERM systems has failed to deliver on expectation is that this is also a design problem. So, for example, an academic complains that s/he is no longer able to access an important e-journal. As the e-resource librarian investigates, the journal title needs to be mapped to commercial constructs such as the package right across the e-resource lifecycle in the system. The library management system has never had to handle this complexity.

Think local

Has the report had demonstrated sufficient sensitivity to local information resource needs? The report proposes:

Guarantee equality of access to electronic resources for students and researchers across institutions, potentially including colleges delivering such as Foundation Degrees.

I therefore wonder how much local flexibility will remain in place. It reminds me a bit of the whole supplier selection issue in public libraries – a risk of disintermediating the close relationship that currently exists between academics and liaison librarians in this instance, helping to ensure responsiveness to academic needs. The packaging of journals and national deals already compromise this. One of the most important takeaways from last month’s UKSG conference was the growing resentment of libraries towards National Deals as the need to manage costs means increased attention at the level of individual titles.

Can the authors of the report guarantee that local responsiveness will remain in place? Is there a risk that academics will simply take matters into their own hands and effectively disintermediate the library in order to get access to what they need? And if some vestige of local control is retained, we need to bear in mind that currently the management of locally procured materials alongside the national deals is yet another significant problem in ERM.

On the other hand, the enhanced aggregated usage statistics that the report proposes does offer the possibility of improved decision-making in acquisitions.

National level licensing

On licensing, the report states that

88% of respondents either agreed or agreed strongly that ERM linked to licensing at a national level would be liberating.

I agree that we should be questioning the need for local divergence in licensing terms; ERM would be greatly simplified with standard licences. Even if there remained some localised needs, a cooperative approach to licensing would ensure that e-resource librarians would only have to input those localised clauses. A system that could be readily queried for licensing terms of individual journal titles would be a great step forward, although the problem remains of the disparity between the commercial entity and the individual title.

Melting Pot

Overall, in terms of the ERM-specific proposals, I fear that the Shared Services report is conflating the need to eliminate duplication of back-office effort with ongoing acute problems in the ERM sphere, and that the scope creep which I alluded to in my first blog will be particularly problematic with this area of the initiative.

I kicked off this mini-series of blogs on the SCONUL Shared Services Report with some overall impressions. In this second blog, I want to open my discussion of the report’s proposals for a shared library management system by reiterating a point I made in my opening blog, namely that the scope of the project and its potential impact on academic library services is breathtaking:

“… the business case is grounded in procurement, licensing, discovery and delivery, plus associated ‘web scale’ user services; this demands inclusion of remaining local library services which will consequentially have a reduced footprint.”

Towards a sharing culture

The report confirms the impression that many of us have had that there is strong support among academic librarians for the development of shared library management services – 78 UK HE libraries expressed this during the project’s consultation period. The report adds that

… the higher education library community increasingly recognises that the strength of the individual library collection and the quality of its catalogue may no longer represent essential differentiators between UK institutions.

Interestingly, the report also argues that the dynamics change at national level, seeing shared services as an instrument to

Provide a visible national differentiator for overseas students seeking to study in the UK HE system.

The authors also recommend subjecting the reference implementation to “open interfaces, standards based documentation and Open Source software with a licence that facilitates commercial exploitation, which will enable institutional, community and commercial developers to build and to interface components.”

Changes

I’m not an expert on the history of the library management system, and I’m happy to place my trust in my former colleague and co-author of this report, Ken Chad. It is clear that the context of the library management system has been transformed since its emergence in the 1980s. In particular, as the report points out, it is predicated upon the need to manage local print collections and their relationship with the patron. The shortcomings of the focus on printed formats are of course self-evident.

The report describes library management systems as “high value in terms of library budgets yet low value in terms of supplier return on investment”. The report also points out in its business case for a shared service initiative that:

Academic libraries across the UK are duplicating tasks that could be performed more efficiently on a shared basis. The web has raised questions around the value in traditionally localised processes (such as cataloguing) and services (such as the online catalogue or ‘OPAC’). Due to a perceived lack of innovation in the UK LMS market, Higher Education Institutions are predominantly not currently investing in LMS (apart from maintaining existing systems).

Minority voices have called for disaggregation and open interfaces, but this has not come to pass in the library software marketplace.

Wild is the wind

How has the library management system survived this tumultuous change thus far? Well it’s probably down to a combination of libraries’ residual dependence on printed resources, and therefore students’ ongoing need for library-specific transactions and account information (accepting the trend towards pulling core patron data from institutional systems), with maybe a degree of market inertia. It’s important to realise though that the forces acting upon all areas of library technology are still working themselves out, and a large-scale intervention in the midst of this change bears a heavy responsibility.

Without foreknowledge of broad outcomes, it’s my belief that we need to endow key players with as much agility and agency as possible. In a very recent Library 2.0 podcast, UK RFID expert Mick Fortune describes the introduction of RFID-enabled intelligent shelving at Cardiff University, which is apposite here. Because the local library management system could not handle the resulting high volumes of query traffic (despite the chronicle of the death of print foretold), a separate system was placed in parallel with the circulation module containing the book jacket and holdings information needed to interact with the intelligent shelving devices. Can the proposed model accommodate local initiatives such as this? If so, how responsive will the new set-up be to immediate local needs? How is the proposed blend of “in-house, sub-contracted and open source” approaches to interoperate with a top-down Pathfinder Board?                                                                        .

One of the problems for Heads of Service in the academic library sector has been (multiple) high exit barriers in the library management system marketplace. With this proposal of a centralised (even if co-opting the open source community in the process) solution, we need to ensure that we aren’t simply replacing one monolith with another in only a slightly different guise, and raising rather than lowering barriers to change during this challenging period.

SCONUL has published its HEFCE Shared Services Study against a backdrop of considerable interest for the idea of shared services on the UK library scene, triggered by the deteriorating global economic conditions that we’re only too aware of. The report is a HEFCE-funded feasibility study into a shared services approach to the library management system and related systems in UK higher education libraries.

The public expenditure discourse during the UK’s recent election campaign was thin and arguably evasive, giving the impression that the frontline could be maintained through back-office savings. Those of us who work in and around public services will know that there’s not much meat left on the back-office bone. Shared services in the area of library technology, though, do seem to offer considerable savings through rationalised elimination of duplication, and so this report commands our attention.

I will be covering this report in a series of three blogs. Today I’m talking about the general proposition that the report is communicating. I will cover two specific areas – the Library Management System and Electronic Resource Management – in separate posts.

Development by committee?

But this feasibility study is quite concrete, in organisational terms at least, proposing the setting up of an operating entity to deliver the Shared Service as a company limited by guarantee. This inevitably raises the spectre of Development by Committee. Towards the beginning, the report states:

The Members of the Board will include the Service Director, representatives of JISC JIR and the Pathfinder Partners. HEFCE could be represented on the Board should this be appropriate. The JISC JIR role will be informed through the SCONUL and JISC Strategic Alliance.

Scope Creep

Clichés persist for a reason, I find, and both Development by Committee and Scope Creep have become clear indicators of failing software development projects. The scope of this Shared Services Study is breathtakingly huge, encompassing significant areas of library operations. Take this statement, for example:

The business case is grounded in procurement, licensing, discovery and delivery, plus associated ‘web scale’ user services; this demands inclusion of remaining local library services which will consequentially have a reduced footprint.

Very early on in my career, I worked as a systems analyst for British Gas North Western (BGNW), and was lucky enough to spend a year on a project called RoR (now lost in time, as is BGNW itself) which set about modifying systems to reflect structural changes at regional level. Crucially, it didn’t try to gather any “nice little extras” into the project scope, and it astounded everyone at BGNW when it was delivered successfully on time and to budget. I’m also happy to divulge that Talis was eventually successful at delivering MARC21 when it focused purely on the format change, and not on additional nice-to-haves such as interface redesign.

To cut a long story short

What troubles me about this initiative, then, is that it’s as big as a house, encompassing huge tracts of academic library operations, and is being run by a committee from diverse organisations. My specific concerns around the LMS and the ERM dimensions of the project I’ll deal with in the other two posts, but I would have liked to have seen something more bounded, and something that was more bottom-up, in the style of open source development, rather than a top-down committee. By way of example, the report is dated November 2009 but has only just been published. Why the five month delay? What sort of timescales will we be looking at with a runaway scope run by a committee composed of parties from disparate organisations?

Unsurprisingly, the project offers a seductive return on investment. The report estimates required public funding of £8.25m in years 1 to 4 to yield £88.4m savings over the first 10 years. The report is correct to point out that:

Academic libraries across the UK are duplicating tasks that could be performed more efficiently on a shared basis. The web has raised questions around the value in traditionally localised processes (such as cataloguing) and services (such as the online catalogue or OPAC).

Even if many of us would like things to roll along as they have before, most if not all of us know that’s not going to happen in the current conditions. But has the report explored the full gamut of collaborative possibilities open to the sector that could deliver the same outcomes? A single centralised solution could rob us of the agility and innovation we so desperately need right now. The open source movement has thrived on a distributed bottom-up model, and it’s noteworthy that section 7 – Options Appraisal – is fundamentally predicated on a centralised top-down model. But given that it is top-down, why is there no kind of roadmap to tell us how we’re going to reach our destination?

On the other hand, the report points to exemplars such as Australia and Sweden, in which systems are selected at national level (it’s worth pointing out that those national systems were replacing nothing at all, whereas today we have a large and complex infrastructure in place). You could also argue that today’s conditions introduce opportunities for widescale review and renewal, where people bend and adopt to the circumstances and fresh possibilities open up as an unexpected side-effect of austerity. There’s also the question of competitiveness. Factors such as RAE / REF foster competition between universities. Does the proposed homogenisation of systems strip away institutional competitiveness and autonomy? Or is it the case, as the report argues, that these systems have become less critical to institutional differentiation over time? And do the powerful collaborative forces at work in higher education smooth out any barriers that the competitive drive may present?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. Part of me applauds the audacity of such a far-reaching project. Part of me, though, is fearful that an opportunity to make savings with the potential to safeguard our world-class university libraries could turn into a black hole into which increasingly scarce resources disappear forever.

In this podcast, Sarah Bartlett talks with Jo Rowley, Head of Library Services, and Laurie Roberts, Liaison Librarian, at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. With only 4000 FTE students, the library at Queen Margaret University is working at a different scale from many other universities we hear about, and we discuss the impact its small size has on its ability to adopt agile ways of working. Laurie talks about her successes with Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS, blogs and iTunesU in this flexible and innovative culture. Queen Margaret University’s converged services adds to the potential for open-ended experimentation by making technological expertise readily available to the library. Laurie also makes the useful point that the inexpensive nature of Web 2.0 technologies make experimentation easier to justify. We also discuss library presence on the university’s corporate systems, such as the virtual learning environment. The institution gained university status in 2007, and in the same year, a Learning Resource Centre was opened as part of the university’s new campus. Jo gives us a detailed tour through the Learning Resource Centre, and we talk about how students respond to the facilities offered. We also discuss the contribution that the library makes to the Queen Margaret University Strategic Plan 2007-12,  and the challenges that the library will unquestionably face in terms of funding, along with the rest of the sector.