Welcome to the Buyers’ Guide
Directory 2024 Available in print and online
The power of the buyer
TRADITIONALLY the paying customer wields power in a market. But now paying customers often feel they can’t compete with companies that use their scale and data to ‘discover’ what they can charge.
In the CILIP Buyers’ Guide 2024 our contributors explore some of the new dynamics in these markets – both negative forces that will require buyers to be innovative in defending their communities and institu- tions, and positive ones that buyers are helping to grow.
Back in 2021 Masud Khokar, University Librarian and Keeper of the Brotherton Collection at the University of Leeds (and a computer scientist), told Information Professional: “This might sound crazy, but I think the library sector needs to invest in or create our own start-ups. It would bring that culture of entrepreneurship into libraries. It would mean that we can own our future rather than depend on others (often large monopolies) to deliver it for us. Not many of us think with our entrepreneurship hats on. We don’t believe we can own our own destinations in these areas. If 80 per cent of start-ups fail, our risk- averse culture doesn’t help us.”
In this issue we hear from Frode Opdahl, CEO of AI-driven library start-up Keenious, who believes buyers already play a key role in achieving Masud’s ‘crazy’ vision, and have created start-up friendly environ- ments that offer not just money, but time and collaboration to entrepreneurs. While discussing the origins of Keenious, a library tool gaining traction in academic libraries across the world, he said “I never worked in a library, I’m a computer science student and I wasn’t a big user of the library myself.” However, he has found the collaborative nature of the sector not just a great help to his own company, but he now believes it is also a hidden USP for potential investors, reducing risk and adding transparency.
On the other side of the buyer coin, Caroline Ball, an academic librarian and campaigner for #EbookSoS, looks at the defensive responsibilities of buyers. Here she writes about the problematic gap between library ethics and the data policies of the publishers whose products they buy licences for, saying: “In the digital realm, through licensing models rather than outright purchase, publishers and vendors reserve a level of surveillance over usage that would not be tolerated with physical materials.”
These products have the potential to extract rich and intrusive data from users, the use of which remains largely unregulated. It means the only thing standing between the valuable data of the institutions, their students and researchers, is the negotiating skill of their buyers. Caroline sets out the problem and some of the actions they could take.
From the public library sector we talk to Hertfordshire’s Russel Barrow, Principal Librarian, Opera- tions: West, about how pop-up banking is being developed as an income stream without impinging on core library functions, but also, equally important, how training and a change of mindset, has led to the development of a commercial strategy and understanding how to turn one-off opportunities into con- stant income streams. Together these demonstrate the broad range of skills and vision the sector now needs its buyers to have.
Matt Cox, Head of Content Delivery and Discovery at Anglia Ruskin University, talks about the career of a buyer. Having been poached from another sector himself he doesn’t have a library qualification, but he believes skills and aptitude are increasingly what recruiters are looking for, adding that he has been well supported by colleagues.
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