Welcome to the Buyers’ Guide
Directory 2026 Available online
Exploring relationships
Whether it’s how AI is changing libraries to why buyers and suppliers should start planning for WLIC 2027, the 2026 issue of the Buyers’ Guide explores relationships with buyers and suppliers.
The first article revisits a presentation made at the 2025 Green Libraries Conference by Jon Ray from Oxford University, on how the levers of sustainability will increasingly fall into the hands of buyers. An institution has more control over its environmental footprint and as it works to decrease it’s own environmental footprint, so the proportion of that footprint shifts into the products and services it buys in. Jon looks at how to measure and influence this.
Then Caroline Ball from the Open Book Collective says the tension between the HE sector and commercial publishers has kept a spotlight on journals and off books and that “long- form scholarship risks quietly becoming one of the most structurally vulnerable parts of the scholarly communications ecosystem.” She explains how the collective funding model works and how to talk to decision makers about it.
Jon Field, from Open Fifth discusses a number of concerns about AI like “Digital sovereign- ty” and whether libraries are trapped between AI bot invaders and AI bot defenders and warns against institutions sleepwalking into dependence saying “There are also commercial pressures from AI companies to use their products, or new AI features stealthily appearing in otherwise non-AI software. Right now, we are being teased into them as access is given freely to train the tools and foster a dependence.”
Then, with the World Library and Information Congress coming to London in 2027, Helen Mandl and Alain Zayan from IFLA explain who might be coming. Their stats show that 75 per cent of delegates have buying or budget responsibilities so WLIC should be a rich net- working opportunity for buyers as well as a commercial opportunity for suppliers.
And OCLC ends the issue with a Q&A from Gemma Burke, Marketing Operations Manager, EMEA & APAC, OCLC, about why it has had a stall and sponsored WLIC for decades. Plus a few tips for potential exhibitors: “It is essential to allow plenty of time for planning – whether that is planning what your exhibition stand will look like, what you want to send to have on your stand, or even down to looking into the entry requirements for the location. All these things often take longer than expected, so it is better to start planning sooner rather than later.”
Rob Mackinlay 5
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