Welcome to the Buyers’ Guide
Directory 2023 Available in print and online
Buying for balance
HOW to balance the competing values of central buying and local buying and how to find the arguments that political leaders might actually listen to.
The 2023 CILIP Buyer’s Guide has interviews with library and knowledge buyers from the academic, public and health sectors. But the first piece is from a researcher at the Institute for Government, a think tank focused on making government more effective. Stuart Hoddinott works in the Institute’s public services team and is able to take an unbiased view across many services to see how public libraries fit into the big picture. It is not an uplifting view. He says that the financial situation is so bad that public libraries are likely to be in the firing line again, despite having raised their profile with local authority leaders during Covid. However, Stuart identifies three key drivers behind funding decisions for public services: legal protection, political salience, and the extent to which they are acute services – likely to see a rise in use as a result of the crisis. He discusses how libraries might push themselves further up these priority lists.
Diana Edmonds, National Director of Libraries at GLL, explains how GLL works to make the most of its buying power while also giving the diverse communities it serves the ability to make their own choices. Diana also looks at how GLL’s centralisation can help its partners with projects like Warm Spaces, leveraging the organisations links to relevant suppliers – sometimes linked to the non-library side of the organisation – or supporting ambitious local ideas.
Gavin Phillips, category manager, academic services, at Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC), explains how he’s helping university librarians over- come a side-effect of Open Access. Subscriptions Agents – who have until recently managed the relationships between institutions and the thousands of publishers who supply them – are now getting cut out of the Open Access deals being made between big publishers and universities. This has undermined the commercial incentive for doing a job that will cost institutions much more to do themselves.
Finally, Helen Bingham from Health Education England has led the NHS’s ongoing transformation from 91 library management systems to eight and is in the process of implementing a discovery platform that will enable staff to find local and national resources. In this piece she explores how the NHS and its suppliers cope with not quite fitting into any sector while also being extremely complex.
Rob Mackinlay 5
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48
