It’s been a tough old year. Ditching out of 7 R&P deals at once naturally brings with it a whole host of stressful situations to navigate. Through all of this, an absolutely excellent piece of work (that I am very proud we achieved) underpinned a huge amount of our strategic thinking and decision making.

Prior to any budget cuts, the decision had already been made that we in the Library should work with external colleagues to co-create a set of Library Collections Principles

When we set out on this journey, the goal was to create these principles in a way that contained a pragmatic understanding of the realities of collection acquisition, whilst also aligning closely with our University values, as well as speaking to the needs of our wider community.

This required collaboration, so a group of my excellent colleagues embarked on a consultation exercise to try and capture the thoughts and feelings of colleagues across all of the faculties and departments that the Library supports.

Members of the Library & Archives Committee, including library staff and academic staff in their role as Faculty representatives, met, talked, collaborated, and in the end co-created a set of Library Collections Principles. 

The best thing about this set of principles, in my opinion, is that they explicitly outline our aims and goals in a positive way, whilst also clearly expressing our values and showing what we are striving to achieve. Setting out expectations in terms of fair treatment and for those we work with to have the best interest of our students and institution at heart allow us to push for our goals in the clearest possible terms. They present a clear and unambiguous picture of who we are and what we want. I particularly value the championing of ethical practice across the scholarly publishing landscape, and an aim towards open access.

Principles via video

This video provides a visual-and-audio overview of our collections principles; the full version is in the text below. It is narrated by Ned Potter (Faculty Engagement Manager) and Sarah Thompson (Assistant Director, Content and Open Research).

Our Collections Principles

We align our collections with the University’s strategic goals. Our collection development will directly support the University’s research and teaching objectives. We balance core collection needs with sustainability, diversity and ethical considerations.

We prioritise value in our collections. To make best use of University resources and ensure financial resilience, we make data-driven decisions about the resources we acquire and maintain. Usage statistics and cost-per-use are key, but won’t be the exclusive factors in our choices: we recognise that the value of a specific resource depends highly on the context of its use.

We work with faculties to understand how resources will support their activities, including teaching, research and publication. 

We develop collections that reflect our diverse communities. We prioritise resources which diversify our collections, and help establish an inclusive environment for students and staff. We support equality, diversity and inclusion as one of the four University core principles. 

We champion open research. We support varying offers of publishing including ‘pay to publish’ as well as new and emerging models such as ‘Diamond’ open access. We will continue to support open research, including via the White Rose University Press, maximising our research dissemination, and its public availability. 

We help researchers to share their work. We enable academics to disseminate their work as open access, supporting them to retain the rights to reuse and share their research, and helping them to meet funder and REF open access requirements. 

We enhance teaching resources. We provide access to the resources required to deliver teaching and to comply with accredited course requirements. Our Reading List system allows clear identification of  essential reading for students and their provision by the University Library. Our ambition is to support the use of Open Educational Textbooks in the long term.

We will partner with ethical suppliers. We prioritise suppliers with sustainable business models and transparent practices. We expect suppliers to adhere to ethical conduct and avoid harmful practices.

We balance our principles with practical considerations. We are pragmatic about the need to support the University’s objectives. We recognise that critical resources are sometimes exclusively available through suppliers that display challenging behaviour; the goal is to influence improvement or support the longer-term identification of alternatives.

We aim to positively influence the publishing landscape. We will challenge publishers who engage in disingenuous, manipulative, or predatory practices towards York academics. We are producing a guide for academic staff on how to identify and avoid problematic publisher behaviours. 

We will invest in the future. We will allocate resources to support open content, reduce reliance on problematic suppliers, and continually evaluate our collections to meet evolving needs.

Have they been useful?

Enormously so. The good thing about having a set of such ambitious and forward looking principles is that we can use them to frame our goals and expected outcome in any discussion, conference, or negotiation we have, particularly with suppliers that operate in ways that we want to challenge. The principles inherently contain a level of pragmatism and, as such, do not demand that we tilt at windmills, or take stands in extreme ways that cause short term harm. Instead, they allow us to organise ourselves around long term strategic projects and reviews that will see us living up to them over the long term.

They act as a guide to what we want, and set out the broad route we plan to take. We have used these principles specifically in negotiations and discussions to identify terms and behaviours that we find unacceptable and have succeeded in changing these where possible. I anticipate that using these principles as the bedrock for our future strategic approach will continue to bring us successful outcomes.