Interview
A truly exciting time
Danny Kingsley, deputy director at Cambridge University Library, looks back at her early days at Australian National University – and forward to the many challenges facing librarians
Tell us a little about your background and qualifications? In 1995 I chose, in my honours year of a degree in science and technology studies, to look at how researchers were responding to these newfangled things called ‘online journals’. For your younger readers, 1995 was the year the World Wide Web came to life. At the time this was such a new area, I was struggling to find references for my literature review. I worked for a decade as a science journalist (more on that later) and then in 2003 some press releases started coming across my desk about something called ‘open access’. Not surprisingly, given the term was only newly minted, I had not heard of open access, but I did recognise the names of some of the people involved as being those I had referenced in my honours thesis. So I decided the time was right to get back in the game and applied to Australian National University (ANU) to do a PhD.
My PhD looked at why researchers
overwhelmingly said that open access was a good idea, yet only 10 to 15 per cent of research was openly available. My findings (spoiler alert) were that disciplinary differences are incredibly important and that whatever solution you offer to the research community will need to be easy to use, not risk the status quo and demonstrate clear improvement to, and greater benefit than, the current system (I’m not sure we have cracked that, by the way).
In my empirical research I interviewed
researchers at ANU and at University of NSW. The difference between them was that at the time ANU had a repository of over a decade’s standing, and UNSW had not yet launched its repository. However,
16 Research Information December 2018/January 2019
when I spoke to people at ANU they were almost all unaware of the repository. This set off alarm bells, and I started agitating amongst the senior executive of ANU that the institution was at risk of losing its reputation as a leader in this area. On graduation I was awarded with a new position ‘to fix it’. After four years of developing policy and upgrading and relaunching the repository, I moved to establish the Australian Open Access Support Group (now the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group) to provide advocacy and advice on open access across the sector. And now I am at Cambridge. My past few positions have been ones that did not exist before I started. This reflects the fast moving pace of the area of scholarly communication. So I have been in ‘start-up’ mode for more than a decade.
How does the rarified atmosphere at Cambridge University Library compare with your time at the Australian National University? In many ways the experience is not that different, surprisingly. No matter how much all higher education
research-intensive institutions like to think they are unique, there is a strong thread of similarity between them. In all positions that require pushing a change agenda through, it is a matter of understanding the governance structures and ensuring you are able to communicate clearly to those people who are in a position to make decisions. It is also important to understand the concerns and anxieties of those people who will be affected by the changes. The policy landscape is different in the UK because of the ‘Finch effect’ and
there is a significant difference in scale, in terms of the volume of material my team is processing and making available, but there are many parallels between the positions. Both institutions were what was described as ‘test bed institutions’ for DSpace in the early 2000s, and in both cases there had been a great deal of initial work followed by some years of neglect, so the job to get things moving again was very familiar when I arrived. I have also repeated the legacy theses programme I undertook at ANU here.
What I have very much appreciated at Cambridge, particularly in the first couple of years, was that I was able to simply get on with the job. I have been able to share openly with our community our successes and the areas where we learned through experiment. One of the advantages of working at Cambridge has been that it
“For your younger readers, 1995 was the year the World Wide Web came to life”
provides a huge stage: rightly or wrongly, what happens at Cambridge is big news. So we have been able to accelerate progress across the sector by acting openly, transparently and inclusively. As it happens the same week as I am doing this interview I presented a keynote to a meeting of the Australian equivalent of UK Council of Research Repositories (
http://ukcorr.org/), the CAUL Australasian Institutional Repository Support Service. In it, I described some of the differences between working in scholarly communication here and there. Despite a slight cultural cringe in
Australia that ‘everything must be better over there’, in reality Australia has been ahead of the game in many areas of scholarly communication. The now very mature Research Data Australia service is still the only significant example world-wide of a central register for research datasets, while in the UK we are still exploring beta
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