INTERVIEW ‘‘
There are so many disruptive factors in HE at the moment. The financial crisis is only one of them. AI is another. Alongside this we have an academic publisher community that is attached to old fashioned business models... – Ann Rossiter
Rob Mackinlay is a journalist for Information Professional.
Tipping point or boiling point?
Whether it’s their relationships with suppliers, users, or their own institutions HE libraries are treading a fine line between crisis and opportunity says Ann Rossiter, Executive Director of SCONUL.
UNIVERSITY budget cuts – driven by years of frozen tuition fees, cuts to international student numbers and increases in National Insurance – have led to jobs, courses and whole departments disappearing. The HE Library sector is still assessing its position. Ann Rossiter says when SCONUL surveyed its mem- bers in January (
https://tinyurl.com/IPA25AR1) it discovered that HE libraries expect to spend £51m less in 2025 than in 2024 – a cut of about nine per cent. But that picture is changing: “Given what we know from other sources our figures might be an underes- timate. A more recent Universities UK (UUK) survey of 60 institutions suggests that cuts are deeper. (
https://tinyurl.com/IPA25AR2).”
And UUK also suggests financial pressures are increasing. “So, we’re not at the end of it,” Ann says, “and of course that’s going to have an impact on library teams and what’s required from the library for the institution.”
Visibility “I’m very aware that the readers of this interview are going to be incredibly anxious. It’s a very stressful time.” However, she said: “Libraries are being incred- ibly actively lobbied for. SCONUL is supporting its members to be as effective as possible in doing that.” Some of this is intensified lobbying along traditional lines like highlighting library value to institutions, their role in achieving good NSS scores and their support for research, teaching and learning.
Autumn 2025
But disruption from the funding crisis has opened up new avenues for advocacy. “Because libraries are good at creating frictionless services, nobody looks inside,” Ann said, “they’re black boxes. So, if there is an upside to what’s happening now, it’s that people are having hypothetical conversations about what libraries will no longer be able to do – that if we reduce the budget by X, then we won’t get Y. “It’s the proverb that in every crisis there’s an opportunity. We get the opportunity to talk to aca- demics and university leaders about the implications of not funding libraries properly. It means telling academics ‘you won’t get your stuff anymore’ and academics go ‘Hang on, does that really mean I can’t get my favourite journal anymore?’.”
Sky fall?
The funding crisis adds a new dimension to another old problem – big deals with big publishers. “In the long-term the sector’s relationship with publishers is still one of its biggest issues. But this year there are other hugely important demands on people’s time and attention. If your institution is asking you to make 10 per cent cuts, then that is a very pressing issue. And given that three quarters, approximately,
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