Last week I attended the latest University Science and Technology Librarians Group (USTLG) meet up in Oxford. If I’m honest it wasn’t so much the programme that attracted me this time but rather the location! I’ve never been to Oxford and don’t see myself making any plans to in the near future and so I was excited to explore the famous university campus.

The meeting itself was held at the beautiful Keble College, with lunch hosted at the Divinity School just opposite the magnificent Bodleian Library. I’ve never seen so many amazing buildings so close together! On this particular day the Oxford occupation was also in full swing and so the campus was surprisingly quiet and security on high alert.

Keynote and REF update

Professor Richard Darton, a chemical engineer, kicked off the day with a rather controversial and quite frankly uninspiring discussion about an academic’s perspective on libraries supporting research. He started off quite well talking about how the role of a librarian has changed and romanticised about old libraries being repositories of printed knowledge. Everyone likes the old “libraries are a treasure” story, right? But it was quite distracting that he seemed to want to justify his ‘knowledge’ of libraries by presenting us with his family history (the Dartons were part of a publishing group way back when). There was also a few jokes in there about library stock, particularly the Bodleian collection, being regarded as museum artifacts and how it was always difficult to loan items – still is in some cases.

So moving on from the librarian as curator introduction he went on to discuss the librarian as supplier with the acquisition of journals “tak[ing] the place of books”. Now that’s not quite true but I’ll give him that one as it’s really the next point I started to take issue with. Professor Darton’s final ‘librarian as…’ meme focused on the librarian as web manager because “everything is available on the web now”. Basically he was suggesting here that today’s librarians do little more than manage user interfaces and journal subscription fees.

Rather than present a case for why we still need libraries he told us all that “high quality information is available on the web and Google gets good results now”. Apparently there’s a lot of information out there and it’s not difficult to get hold of the good quality stuff (providing you know how to of course). So with that being the case Professor Darton announced that “libraries are pretty much a thing of the past”. He said that physical libraries only really have a place for researchers needing access to really old material and that the sciences should stop funding buildings used mainly by the arts. Instead he proposed handing budgets over to researchers to manage their own information needs – something that got a gasp from the audience – as this would overcome the pay barriers they faced when trying to access online material.

Now don’t be too down, the old peer-review model also got a lashing! Consider the idea that many researchers these days have never held a paper journal in their hands <sarcasm> because all journals are electronic now and all the information you need is available on the web anyway </sarcasm>. It means that our loyalties to established journals are disappearing. Academics are publishing material in more specialised journals through open access models and supposedly fragmenting subjects. The peer-review method is no longer a guarantee of quality and to counter this reviewers names should be published alongside papers. This is where I guess I started to lose interest in what was being said, I just couldn’t take him seriously anymore, but it was rather worrying that he seemed to think researchers have an innate ability to evaluate quality, even though he admitted recommended library training to his own students.

A very odd opening to say the least but he got our attention, for the most part. Next up was Kimberley Hacket from the Research Excellence Framework (REF) to give us an update on their future plans. The purpose of REF is to secure the continuation of world-class dynamic and responsive research in the UK through a system of quality assessment (it’s to replace the Research Assessment Exercise). Aiming to support and drive up research across disciplines its key features include a process of expert review (informed by citation information) that measures three distinct elements – outputs, impact and environment. She ran through some on the developments and implementation details, which are all outlined on their website.

Coming next: Part II Research metrics and citations count.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 at 11:22 am and is filed under Libraries and tagged as oxford, ref, ustlg. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.