they’re actually buying and passing on to us. So this becomes increasingly murky. Because of this reseller dynamic, we need to push into this much more.
Internal buy-in
Jon said push back can be expected at the start of a project like this as many organ- isations will have hundreds of suppliers so it can appear overwhelming and hard to see where to start. “But once you start to break it down, it becomes much more achievable,” he said. “Once you look at who your top suppliers are, often you’ll find there’s an 80/20 rule.”
He also suggested using purchasing cat- egories. “For the Bodleian Libraries, the biggest single category is content acquisi- tion or library materials – books, journals, ebooks, ejournals. And once we start to break it down into those categories, what we find is a relatively small number of suppliers in those categories that we need to go and talk to. So it becomes much less overwhelming.”
External buy-in
“From my experience asking the ques- tion is the single most powerful thing you can do,” Jon said. “For library mater ials, many of these suppliers are large, multinationals, global organisa- tions and they’re getting hit by all these questions, all the time. It might be me one day, it might be Cambridge the next day and another library the next day. Often, we’re all asking the same question. “We’re all running our own marathons and we need to come together and collaborate. We’re all trying to get to the same goal, we’re all trying to decar- bonise and reduce our environmental impact. And so we thought rather than us trying to do this all individually, why don’t we come together, get some common language, common standards some shared positions? To do this we’re starting to talk to funders, trade bodies and suppliers to join forces.”
He said this would “reduce the amount
of resource being put into this and get transparency… use the collective weight of what our libraries in the UK and Ireland are spending on services with these publishers, to see if we can we influence it.”
AI
One advantage of having a clear assess- ment tool is that it could be automated. “This may be heresy to some,” Jon said, “but I’ve started to play with using AI and building a ChatGPT query to do some of this. A lot of suppliers already put this data in the public domain – they want people to know about it. “And if we take something like our scoring mechanism, we can use AI tools to just say ‘here are my suppliers, use this mechanism, go out and tell me what’s happening.’ I’ve experimented with this and it’s pretty good so we’re starting to take some of the leg work out and identify which suppliers we need to talk to about it.” BG
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