Despite this security, work has been done to further embed it into the insti- tution’s workflow. Binni says: “We have a publications department who we work with on certain things. At the moment we are setting up DOIs – digital object identifiers – for Chatham House pub- lications (a permanent identifier used a lot in research) – that makes it more easily searchable online. We’re using the library catalogue as our repository for this. We’ll have metadata and also have the digital version of the work that can be linked to everywhere.


“So now, when something is published it gets a page on the website, but just for three to four years. As the repository, we will also get all the publications and we’ll keep them there forever. It means the website highlights current events and publications while the library aims to have all Chatham House output. We’ve collaborated with them to make sure that we’re part of the workflow and that we get hold of the things. In the past it wasn’t guaranteed that we’d get copies, especially digital. When a department had written a report they’d have a certain number of hard cop- ies and give two to the library. These reports are increasingly digital and there was a risk that we were missing some. Not anymore because we have inserted ourselves into the workflow to make sure that we are collecting everything.”


They said: “Those kinds of collabora- tion projects show the value of library and what we can do, and that leads to more projects and more projects.”


Hard hats (ebooks)


Some of the problems Binni faces are universal among librarians and librar- ies: “A question we get a lot is about ebooks. People think that everything we have is also available digitally. All they


April-May 2022


Binni Brynolf.


see is they can get it for £20 on Amazon and then we have to say, ‘No, it’s £350 for us’. It’s not fun to have to disappoint peo- ple and say ‘no, that’s just a print book, you’re correct we don’t have a digital version.’


“So we haven’t quite moved into ebooks yet, we buy single titles. I’m looking very closely but the packages tend to be big and out of our financial budget. They are negotiated and designed for academic libraries and they are too big and too expensive for a small library like us. Also, the market is so big with different models that we probably need a consortium of small libraries for this, or something more for smaller specialist libraries like ours. I think Jisc has looked at it, also CILIP could be useful.”


The two specialist library groups in Lon- don have been merged into LILA (London Independent Libraries and Archives) with a membership of smaller libraries, often with just one librarian working there, and


Binni says: “We meet up once a quarter to talk about things. We have talked about ebooks and ask each other ‘have you solved this one yet’, but so far we haven’t.”


Journals


Digital disruption in the form of mem- bership and user expectations, has also upset existing established content and how it is managed. “Chatham House has three journals: International Affairs, The World Today and The Journal of Cyber Policy. They are Chatham House journals but they are not published by Chatham House. Members and staff have access, but they can’t be made freely available because they are being published by com- mercial publishers. With the journals we have access because they are our journals but they are hosted by the publisher. For the older issues they are accessed through Jstor.


So we subscribe to Jstor and other resources to get digital access to our


INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL 35


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