content. We have all the hard copies of the journals but we don’t have all the digital copies of the journals because they are hosted by someone else. It is some- thing we need to think about because The Journal of Cyber Policy, for example, which has only been published for five or six years now, with that journal we didn’t automatically have access to it all. We got print copies, but the library had to sub- scribe to it. Not surprisingly people were asking for it and it was a Chatham House journal, so we had to subscribe to it. And also researchers write articles in various places that we don’t always automatically have access to. So there are things to work through here.”
Old hats (Archive)
The disruption is not limited to the librarian role but most of the other hats librarians have to don from time to time: “Chatham House has a big archive – pretty much the history of the institute and I’d say a history of international relations in the UK – and that is something that the library is responsible for. It’s helpful that our LMS (Soutron) does archive manage- ment – which would normally be a separate system – but we’re not archivists, we don’t have those qualifications and we’ve had to learn to look after them properly.” Binni says digital culture puts new pressure on the once static paper-based archive (mainly that it needs to be digitised, searchable and where possible, accessible) but also the harder-to-fathom problems like what to keep. “We have a big section of correspond- ence, letters going back and forth between people who worked at the institute like Winston Churchill who was a director for a while – so there are letters to and from
him in there. We’re not archiving the equivalent now, the emails – the social media – there is thousands of percent more information now than there used to be, which means some of the things that were collected in the archive we aren’t collecting now.”
There are temporary fixes for some of them: “Video files are huge. But we’re OK for as long as YouTube exists – we have a Chatham House YouTube channel – but we want to have our own backup of everything. We have a certain amount of storage on the LMS, but if we were going to start uploading videos it would be really expensive. There have been discussions between the library and the web team and publications about what we’re going to do with all this stuff. We don’t have an answer yet because the storage is really expensive. So, we’re thinking about this, and also about how, in 100 years or 50 years, what historians will be asking for, not just what looks exciting now.”
New hats (KM)
“While we’re definitely doing library and archives, we want to broaden what we’re doing,” Binni says, “So, we’ve been talking to different departments about how the library can support their information/ KM needs. I know CILIP has been looking at knowledge managers and I think for people in specialist libraries like mine, there is a lot of overlap. We are likely to be knowledge managers as well. One area we looked at here was the information and knowledge our departments have around getting grants. There wasn’t a good place to store all this information centrally. So we had a project where we set up a sub-database in our LMS – only available to staff internally – where they can search
and see what other people are doing and see who has already asked organi- sations for something.
“It’s an example of how we’re trying to show that we can provide a searchable database for different kinds of things, not just books and journals. We’re saying ‘we have this system and we can make it work for your departments too’, particularly because Soutron offers a lot of access management possibilities, whether you want it only available to staff on the intranet, or to members or to everybody.
“For example, I’ve been talking to the publications department because they get a lot of copyright requests, and they need a way to keep track of them. Again, we can create a database with whichever fields they need, and then they can be searchable.
“We’re always looking for those kinds of opportunities and it makes sense for us to make use of this system and the skills that we have to help colleagues out in different departments. But then we also have to be wary of creating loads more work!”
Peripheral vision
“And there is loads more work coming down the pipeline, both due to digital disruption and societal disruption/ changes.
“Artificial Intelligence is one of those things that is in my peripheral vision. I need to look at it, but there’s so many other things to look at, and it’s about finding time to look at them all. We know researchers are interested because they have asked for, and we’ve bought, books on it. We are fairly proactive but how much we can do still depends on how much time and resources we have. My manager has spent a lot of time talking to researchers across the house about what they use and their needs because we want them to guide us when we’re looking for new purchases, and new acquisitions.”
One issue that is moving from peripher- al into mainstream vision is decolonisa- tion. Binni says: “There hasn’t been a big announcement on the Chatham House website saying ‘we’re decolonising!’, it’s more about individual departments which I hear about through the Equalities Diver- sity and Inclusion (EDI) working group, doing decolonising projects. “We’re hoping to work with these departments, and look at our library collections as well. We’ve gone to events and we’re doing lots of reading and thinking about the concepts and theory of it, how we’d put it into practice, what does it mean practically for us in the library. And we’re hoping to put it into motion this year – or at the very least
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