‘‘ Procurement
The whole sector needs to work together
After 21 years at Imperial College, Gavin Phillips is moving to the Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC). Here he talks about innovations, challenges and librarians with buying responsibilities.
T
HE choice was either to teach a procurement expert about libraries or to teach a librarian about procurement. Southern
Universities Purchasing Consortium took the second option and Gavin Phillips – until very recently the Acquisitions Services Manager at Imperial College London – started work at SUPC in January and will start his diploma in procurement in February.
Gavin has already had a long relationship with SUPC and says its mission is “not just to create lots of framework agree- ments that universities can access, but to ensure our frameworks and other solu- tions provide value for money and value to students” adding that “my own role is also to add value to the university sector as a whole, not just bring in more spend to a framework agreement – so making that framework more appropriate to the library sector. It’s a large piece of work involving sector engagement.”
The nudge
One aim is to find flexibility and grow common ground between suppliers and university libraries. For example, how procurement regulations might support a system in which buyers can expect changes and improvements while also giving sup- pliers a chance to signal their intentions and carry them out. “We shouldn’t just assume that they can make that change by snapping their fingers and we don’t want them to get to a point where they can’t get on the framework anymore.” He says, “So we can use procurement to nudge development without making it mandatory and that’s one of the nuances. It will come
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down to what is compliant with regula- tions and what isn’t.”
Metadata
One problematic area he hopes to help SUPC and other consortia address is meta- data. “Ebooks have not been treated in the same way as the print books and there is a bit of a disconnect between different parts of the supply chain,” he says. “The biblio- graphic records we use for discovery for students for ebooks are often very far away from the standards we’d like to see and students don’t get the best search results. Some books may not appear or be too far down the results to be seen, or you have inconsistencies and two editions appear miles from each other.”
But he says there is a lot of metadata work going on in the sector. Jisc is working on issues relating to the National Bibliographic Knowledge Base and the National Acquisi- tions Group are looking at the framework and Gavin expects to be working on how to meet their recommendations in a way that is workable for suppliers.
“There are some elements that they should be able to implement now,” he says “But lots of suppliers won’t be able to improve things in the time frame of the tender so we would use questions: maybe get them to commit to certain things by a certain date. For example ask “can you do this?” but in a way that is not scored. It would allow libraries to say ‘I only want to work with the vendors who say yes to this.’ That way they save themselves the effort of considering people who don’t meet the requirement. And when you can do that it triggers more development in the framework among the suppliers.” Gavin added that the metadata challenge was a specialist one and at Imperial he had been
Ebooks have not been treated in the same way as print books and there is a bit of a disconnect between different parts of the supply chain.
Gavin Phillips
“working with a specialist to ensure proper understanding and translating that to appropriate requirements for suppliers.”
Innovation
Gavin’s last big job at Imperial was implementing Rialto, a Proquest tool that will be embedded into the existing Alma Library Management System. “When libraries are looking to buy books they do it through their suppliers’ website which sends information back to our LMS. Rialto will put that market place directly into the LMS. It means there is no interoperability between the two systems, they will be the same system. We will no longer have to use APIs or EPIs to transfer information between systems which can be unsta- ble and take over night to happen. It’s
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