NEWS FEATURE
Horizon scanning can help find the bright spots in a bleak financial landscape
The ongoing HE funding crisis makes horizon scanning look like a luxury, but it must be done.
IN a recent keynote speech on how to navigate the HE funding crisis, Sarah Pittaway, Director of Library and Learning Resources at Birmingham City University, says: “Even whilst firefighting we still have to be horizon scanning and looking ahead.” Not just looking for a way out, but to anticipate more potential crises and unintended consequences of imme- diate, pressured decisions. “Whether there is hope on the horizon or not,” she says, “we still need to look ahead.” She set out how broad that horizon could be at the EBSCO Open Day in November. On a professional level: “For many CPD is hit badly. What does that mean for our professional identity and development, the networking and connections stuff that libraries and librarians are so good at?” For her own institution she said: “Cuts hamper our ability to innovate and explore some of the newer solutions. I’ve got team members keen to experi- ment with things like Lean Library and I haven’t got the budget for it.” Although she points out it’s likely to be worse for others because “unlike many institutions at the minute, my institution, BCU, isn’t in a terrible place financially.”
Firefighting “What I see and hear when I talk to colleagues is a weariness. It’s hard work right now. I spoke to someone recently who’d been through a restruc- ture 12-18 months ago and is looking at another one to reduce costs. Therefore it’s incredibly hard to lift beyond the immediate issues that we’re facing.” But most of the issues affecting fund- ing are beyond the library remit – from stagnant tuition fees (recently increased tuition fees are offset by national insur- ance increases) through to increased competition for domestic students (with lower entry requirements cascading
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through the sector) – so library leaders must advocate for libraries within their institutions.
Fanning the flames
And while the money runs dry, univer- sities face increasing demands. Some are new like higher expectations for student support, but many are old, familiar and increasingly painful. In particular the “transformative Open Access agreements which come with continuously rising costs” so that “just to maintain a set of library resources requires a budget increase each year to cover sub cost increases”.
These can also sap resources in other ways. Sarah gives an example of an academic’s book being available to a university library, but not the Ebook, except in a bundle costing several thou- sand pounds.
In a time of crisis these licensing mod- els make decision-making harder: “We probably all use evidence based decision making when it comes to subscriptions and cancellations, but so much is bound up in those big deals when it comes to journals, so that can make cutting hard.”
AI oxygen blast
She sees the current AI technology revolution as a particular challenge with the funding crisis and licensing models,
adding: “We’re seeing lots of innova- tion from publishers, vendors, systems providers – an obvious space for it. but number, we can’t necessarily afford those things at the minute.” AI also brings training and CPD costs: “We need to educate our existing researchers, and those vetting incoming researchers, but what can vendors and publishers do to help us?” AI will mean extra costs, not just in terms of the products themselves, but extra time to understand the value, extra time to train staff, and extra risk because contracts are being signed un- der pressure. This is while tension over rights and responsibilities between all stakeholders in the ecosystem – read- ers, authors, libraries, aggregators and publishers – are moving targets. She said many conversations with publishers need to be had, and rec- ommends this Scholarly Kitchen article “Woefully Insufficient Publisher Policies on Author AI Use Put Research Integrity at Risk”
https://bit.ly/4gh5yk2 as an example of what librarians need to be aware of, just for AI. CILIP’s Future Literacies work was designed for public libraries, but the horizon scanning tools in Rain or Shine can be transferred to any sector. Download it at
www.cilip.org.uk/page/come- rain-download.
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