‘the other university agendas are about, again in common with others, widening participation, which in our case again means perhaps more part-time students, different patterns of attendance and a greater outreach into the region, greater dispersal and so more and more time spent away from the campus. And that makes it more important to provide electronic information, but makes it more difficult to manage the delivery’ [28401, from text units 20-23]

‘and the other thing for us, we are striving to maintain the very high status we have in terms of research and teaching institution...getting it is one thing, maintaining it is another...it means everyone is pushed to their limits and that we are expected to deliver excellent resources and the library is part of that’ [34401, from text units 15-49]

‘The problem we’ve had recently has all been in the cost area and the fact that these deals have come through thick and fast without, necessarily, an awful lot of warning and it’s just the sheer problem of budgeting for them... and then the deals are often tied in with the question of non-cancellation clauses and things like that. So there are lots of issues around budgeting and the costs.’ [20401, from text units 42-64]

‘our approach has been opportunistic in a sense that, and I can’t see that it can be anything other, if a good deal is offered, we take it... the principle of the deal, I suppose has been, perhaps because we’re unprincipled, has become less important. Let me give you a ...for instance on the [publisher name] deal that was and is an incredibly more favourable deal for small institutions than it is for big ones...Now for that, that to us is an opportunity so good that we couldn’t turn it down’ [18401, from text unit paragraphs 37-38]

‘if you’re getting licences that are going to take over the next three years, five years, whatever, you’re tying yourself in... so the money side of things is a problem but it hasn’t stopped us going ahead [22401, from text unit paragraphs 13-14]...you can’t ignore the value for money deals.. you just feel all the time that you’re treading a very precarious line’. [22401, from text unit paragraphs 21-22]

‘We are constantly sitting back and trying to look at where we’ve got so far...whether we’re doing it the right way, changing it a bit...we’re learning as we’re going along and it’s very difficult to see into the future.’ [22401 from text unit paragraphs 40-41]

‘I suppose the crucial issue is the very difficult one of the relationship between electronic publishing and conventional publishing and the issues that arise from that in terms of the affording of electronic versions of scholarly materials, and I think we’re still seeing new models proposed for that relationship...So I think the pattern of scholarly communication is important’ [18401 from text unit paragraphs 8-9]

‘We have made some joint purchases or joint subscriptions within [name of collaboration]...we started doing that really before there were so many HE deals and then it was easier but now very often people say we won’t talk to a consortium because we’re currently negotiating with whatever interest...JISC or somebody...very often if you’re not careful you can get caught in a trap whereby you do a consortial deal and then suddenly a few months down the line there’s a wider HE deal that’s actually more beneficial, so you’ve got to be very careful about not getting your fingers burnt’ [22401 from text unit paragraphs 23-24]

‘the staffing changes that we made...the fundamental one was that we completely restructured LIS when it was just the library service back in ’94/95, that was in response to an enforced downsizing...we had to take roughly 22% out of the staffing budget and it had to be the staffing budget...Since then the main change has been the integration of academic computing services with LIS but that hasn’t been as fundamental as I would have hoped ...the systems teams are still separate...ideally you would want to see users’ support system teams integrated into the school teams and only a very small core of people supporting the central infrastructure...but we haven’t been able to achieve that largely because they were cut back massively in ’96 before they merged with us...most of the user support people went then so we haven’t got any user support people to integrate in.’ [11401 from text unit paragraphs 19-20]

‘Staffing budgets are just constantly being held down. We can demonstrate greater demand across a whole range of services but there is no money for staffing, so we have to manage it within existing levels’. [28401 from text unit paragraphs 36-37]

‘I think the main difficulty is that we have staff in the wrong place now...we have a lot of departmental libraries and as the electronic services are more and more used, they (staff) should be somewhere where they can help with the electronic services more. We need to rearrange the staffing which is never simple’. [17401 from text unit paragraphs 18-19]

‘As regards this particular institution, to plan effectively, there is a difficulty...we’re not a converged service so we are always relying on colleagues within Information Systems, who are separately managed, to do things for us. Our Information Systems is not only separate from the Library but a lot of it is devolved to the Faculty, so we’re constantly having to liaise with different people which makes it very difficult to plan and to make sure that we’re providing an even service across the library system’ [22401 from text unit paragraphs 13-14]

‘We’re quite small, in the fourth division of higher education here in terms of money and provision...and problems of staffing – we’ve only 6 professional staff. Finding time to examine all the initiatives, untangling routes and options to make sense of it all. Generally we’ve aimed at providing access to titles where we get print copies and electronic access is free’ [30401 from text units 99-106]

‘well, this has coincided with us reviewing and changing, quite radically, our Technical Processes Division which deals with journal receipt and all that sort of thing...so for the first time, we’ve got a Serials Librarian...We’ve also set up faculty teams who liaise with the faculties of course and they’re the sort of people who sort the new electronic deals which come along and make recommendations. So we have changed our sort of structure in ways that makes it easier to deal with EIS. This hasn’t been driven purely by the electronic age of course, these changes were long overdue anyway, but they’ve put us in a better position to deal with them’. [20401 from text units 78-95]

‘ ...people who were the middle managers of those sections stayed with us in that they weren’t people who were on short-term contracts but they retained their strategic or library wide responsibility for those areas and helped us move through this transition phase, but they’ve all left now...and so a year ago we were forced to realise that we didn’t have an effective method for managing the three technical services processes within a school team structure so we decided to set up cross team process groups to look at the processes and improve them...so now we’ve got three groups...and library management systems specialist who’s backing up these three areas...So in effect what we’ve got is these three virtual teams replacing the old sectional structure... [11401 from text unit paragraphs 47-48]

‘Well, we’ve been convergent for the past 12 years, but there was a more organisational convergence about 3 years ago. And so there’s been that change, and we work quite closely now, the library and computing, to manage the delivery of services. Within the library we haven’t made as many changes as we probably need to, partly because we haven’t had any vacancies in right sort of places, to be able to move it forward in the way we’d like it to, despite a strong feeling that we need to make an appointment to help us get to grips with electronic journals and better exploit these. And that’s part of our strategy, but we’re having to wait. There’s no money for additional posts..’ [28401 from text unit paragraphs 32-33]

‘I think we would have to try...to look forward to a situation where print and electronic is seen to be much more of a continuum than it is now...that the availability of a journal in print or electronic format...and because we see, I suppose like most people, that journals are moving increasingly towards electronic only delivery we would believe, then the easier the publishers can engage in that type of contract with us, the easier the better really, the quicker the better’ [18401 from text unit paragraphs 45-46]

‘Well we use NESLI and CHEST whenever we can. We prefer bulk deals that don’t limit us on what we can cancel, though you can’t always avoid that, but I think over a few years that will disappear because there’ll be electronic only solutions’ [17401 from text unit paragraphs 24-25]

‘The publishers may think it can continue just by moving everything to electronic services and charging us for that as well, but there is a growing ground swell of opinion that authors and institutions ought to retain the intellectual property rights and yes, they can form partnerships with publishers but they shouldn’t hand it over free of charge and then be charged...if publishers then want to go out and sell that in the market then the institutions and the academics would then get royalties and returns back into the institution and I think that would be fair...you’re paying someone to add value to what you’re doing. What we’ve got at the moment is just completely crazy – it’s not economically viable’ [11401 from text unit paragraphs 60-61]

‘I would have thought that there is much less chance of this (page charges for submission and/or publication) than before...From what I see of the signs, academics, well some anyway are aggressively, perhaps a few are wanting to look towards insisting on a share of the copyright when they publish an article in a journal’ [18401 from text unit paragraphs 58-59]

‘IP authentication versus ATHENS, in particular being able to provide access from outside the campus because we are very dispersed as a university and indeed it’s part of our mission to support people all around the region. A lot of our users wish to login from home and use services in that way and we don’t have dial-in facilities. If they’re using an internet service provider then obviously if the service is depending on IP registration then they’re not recognised as being of the university...are they using that information as a student or in whatever capacity of their life (referring to part-time students), we can’t control it, and some of the restriction or licensing conditions make us feel quite uncomfortable’ [28401 from text unit paragraphs 17-18]

‘a lot of those (health students) are learning at a distance...and so we need flexibility in things like licences, we have such difficulty with those licences that won’t let you have access to them from separate sites except at a huge price and that is unrealistic’ [34401 from text units 60-71]

‘..my intention...would be to try and press for the sort of US practice which is walk in access under the licensing arrangements so that we are not having to differentiate, as we do now, between print, who anybody registered as a user – they may not be staff or a student here but who in effect have access rights’ [18401 from text unit paragraphs 26-27]

‘...as an academic library in a big inner city we get a lot of requests for casual access to consult things that aren’t held in the public library...with the electronic stuff it’s much more difficult, a lot of the licences don’t allow it and anyway, to get on to our network you have to have userids and passwords which we don’t give to casual users’ [22401 from text unit paragraphs 40-41]

‘We do take the licensing conditions seriously, and so we do make sure all our subject librarians are aware of what is and isn’t allowed and we try to make sure we are abiding by those conditions. Obviously having a common licensing arrangement like the NESLI one does make lot easier, because you know what you’re getting, so I think the work they’ve done there is useful’ [28401 from text unit paragraphs 57-58]

‘We do look very carefully at site licences, in fact, all licences are put past our legal people in the university who scrutinise them for us but we’re actually the people who decide whether or not we’re going to take them’ [22401 from text unit paragraphs 21-22]

‘Where we get the electronic version something like for free then we’ll make it available. What we’re struggling with at the moment are some of the NESLI deals where you can go for print plus electronic at a premium or you can go for electronic only and deeply discounted print for those titles that you particularly want in print. Because of the concerns about the network access and the access for PCs we’re still looking at the pros and cons of those sort of things’ [28401 from text unit paragraphs 59-60]

‘we’re getting strong pressure from one of the schools to sign up for it (a publisher’s deal not well favoured) because they don’t want to lose access to the journals they’re currently provided with...if you devolve the budget you can’t always control what happens later even if nominally you are in charge of signing the bills...once you’ve done the genie’s out of the bottle’ [11401 from text unit paragraphs 11-12]

‘We are developing a collection management policy which is actually coming from the faculty teams who are developing information plans for individual departments...so there’s quite a lot of input from the departments themselves and any deals...so that’s the way we go about it – I think it’s got a lot of politics about it...so whether there s pressure from the faculty to renew these things (Science Direct, Academic Press publisher deals) we don’ t want to cut the ground form beneath CURL’ [20401 from text units 183-190]

‘Well, I suppose in some ways they (subject based deals) are easier to handle, for instance if the Institute of Physics makes us an offer on their journal, that’s quite easy to manage so we talk to our Physics department and negotiate whether or not we want to commit money to that. Where we’ve got something like Elsevier Science or Academic Press which cover a panoply of subjects then we discuss it with the right range of departments – so it is more difficult. If that’s the way they are being delivered then that’s the way we have to respond’ [18401 from text unit paragraphs 40-41]

‘...where you get publishers tempting you by saying you have access to all our journals, electronic journals, well 99% of them – it sounds tempting but in fact a large number of those journals wouldn’t be of any interest to our users because they’re not subjects that are taught here. So, sounds nice the publisher-based thing but in fact we’d probably go for a more selective subject-based one’ [20401 from text units 198-202]

‘we can see areas where we’ve got big gaps...I don’t know if it would be of more interest but it would be of interest to see more subject based...but again you’d have to be quite careful of how you defined your subjects otherwise like with the old gateways, it’s fine for the broad old academic subjects but it’s more difficult for the new areas...that’s where I think we’d lose out if we had only subject deals’ [22401 from text unit paragraphs 37-38]

‘Mainly we choose by the research content of the journals...we gave priority to Science Direct because it covers so much material that our people want. And then, they all vary so much, we just assess whether we can afford them and it we think they’re good value.’ [17401 from text unit paragraphs 39-40]

‘We are considering subscribing to JSTOR, the archival parts...but we would like it to be more manageable from our point of view. Electronic journals, maintaining them on the Web is just a huge task...A common front-end, basically, you know a WebSPIRS front-end with ATHENS authentication would be an ideal solution. And faster bandwidths of course! And the rest!’ [34401 from text units 196-210]

‘..we’ve started cataloguing all of our electronic titles individually, then of course if you lose a bundle of titles that’s a huge amount of work you’ve got to undo, when you first take it on it’s a huge amount of work to do...we weighed up the pros and cons of that and decided that if we really wanted people to use these things they’ve got to be able to find them, and the way people naturally find them is by way of a catalogue and while we’ve still got this hybrid library the print sources and so on, that’s probably the way forward so...whatever you do you’re kind of trying to weigh up the advantages, disadvantages, the costs and so on’ [22401 from text unit paragraphs 21-22]

‘Issues about continuing access to back runs of journals can be a problem. We ran into problems by not having back copies of print journals in the TQA assessment – subject reviews as they’re called now’. [11401 from text unit paragraphs 11-12]

‘Now when the readers are doing things electronically and students are printing and paying for that print-out, we are not necessarily getting that money back, they go to the Computing Service or the department’s printer or the department that looks after the printer, so there are implications there because our photocopying fees buy quite a lot of books’ [34401 from text units 217-223]

‘Full-text is favourite. When we introduced charging from our electronic resources the numbers of printing did go down...I’m not sure that that’s a detrimental thing because one got the impression that if it was printed out the student felt, almost by osmosis, they’d learnt something really. Now the ones who pay for a printout...actually do want it as a learning tool rather than an activity in itself...and the price is a mirroring of what we charge for their word processing or whatever’ [14401 from text unit paragraphs 40-41]

‘..with photocopying, photocopying has gone down marginally...because we’ve got this slightly bizarre set up with Information Systems.. in this library (our biggest) all the money from printing and photocopying comes back into the same pockets...in our site it’s slightly different...the money from printing goes to the faculty because of the way we’ve got it set up’ [14401 from text unit paragraphs 43-44]

‘Printing implications are horrendous. In the library...some e-journals are available institution wide, students print using their passwords and have to pay; some are available only in the library. I’m opposed to charging for printing in the library’. [30401 from text units 184-188]

‘...and what we found from the use of Science Direct which gives very detailed statistics is that there is a lot of use of things where we’ve got electronic only and we would never have picked from doing selection title by title.’ [17401 from text unit paragraphs 18-19]

‘The other thing with these electronic journals particularly all of those bundles, because things are changing so rapidly it’s very difficult to say how many you have with say the external subject reviews, they want a lot in hard data...how many books do you have, how much do you spend, how many journals do you have...it’s getting very difficult to provide that kind of information because whatever you think you’ve got one day, the following week is very different’ [22401 from text unit paragraphs 40-41]

‘We’ve always had very heavy used of electronic services by undergraduates and postgraduates, but with academic staff we get feedback through liaison, through formal school boards and committees where we have them and so on. There are particular problems, as far as we know they’re happy with what they’re getting, would like more of it, recognise the resource constraints, but we haven’t done any formal survey. Probably we will use the LIBRA survey methodology given that we’ve done undergraduates and full-time postgraduates’ [11401, from text unit paragraphs 57-58]

‘So I think we would recognise that we have to be more investigative in the way we get feedback from users. We have our usual user groups, focus groups and all this kind of stuff...but on the whole this issue (EIS) doesn’t come out as a burning issue actually...maybe that’s because people are just overwhelmed with all this stuff that we provide...maybe people just take it a second nature...’ [18401 from text unit paragraphs 51-52]

‘We get some statistics but that’s a bit patchy and seems to be dependent on how free the publisher is in providing this. Otherwise it’s feedback from the faculty teams but I think we’re increasingly surveying our users’ [20401 from text units 251-253]

‘I do feel that management information is very shaky...we get some stuff from [name of collaboration], we get some stuff via the web, stuff that we’re providing from our central CD-ROM network but it’s very difficult trying to interpret those statistics and to, again, work out what they mean in terms of...you know if you have to make cuts, where you can reasonably make them’ [22401 from text units 23-24]

‘Could monitor data from suppliers, titles hit and displayed and work out which ones we need and which are peripheral...While we don’t pay it’s not really an issue. If we pay extra then it’s very much of an issue...’ [30401 from text units 174-179]

‘Well for some time we did have a checklist of parameters on which to look at for a deal...it was resurrected a couple of years ago and it was changed but I’m not absolutely sure it’s still being used...It’s up to the Information Specialists to make the judgement either individually or collectively – the parameter checklist would help in that – they would need to liaise with schools to find out what they think about it. There’s no formal collection development strategy...I don’t think there can be one’ [11401 from text unit paragraphs 38-39]

‘It’s like anything isn’t it...at the end of the day you are balancing a budget against the stuff you want to buy. As for a formal collection development strategy, we do have a collection development policy but it was actually written a little while ago and in fact the world has changed so much but what we have done in respect of electronic journals this year...we’ve been looking very carefully at coverage and where we’ve got gaps...’ [22401 from text unit paragraphs 32-33]

‘We do, actually, have a formal collection development strategy and is specific terms about NESLI, I guess we have to be opportunistic’ [17401 from text unit paragraphs 37-38]

‘...what staggers me is although we feel we’re trying to promote these electronic resources...there are clearly a number of people who are not aware of what is there...we stick up posters and do information skills sessions or user education, whatever you call it, until we are blue in the face, well that’s what it feels like...we do a lot of help sheets, we promote things through websites, we try and find as many different ways as we can...we know there’s a really big audience out there who really haven’t got to grips with it...you’ve got the whole spectrum , you’ve got people at one end who use everything and get an awful lot out of it, you’ve got people at the other end who literally haven’t touched them and this broad band in the middle who range from the top end to the bottom end’ [22401 from text units 48-49]

‘I think the complexity and the patchwork of provision...which has to be the major difficulty that we have as marketers, providers and negotiators of content trying to provide some navigable map of this stuff and I think that is increasingly difficult...I don’t know if that’s a truism but everybody uses the web more or less now and in as much as you can provide something which looks like a common interface...it seems people adapt to that very easily...so I don’t see too many problems in the question of use but I do with the issue of trying to understand behaviour’ [18401 from text unit paragraphs 5-6]

‘So we try to get people together to look at the information that we feel needs to be made available and then to agree on structure and style. That in itself is proving quite difficult because trying to get a view across four campuses...there are sometimes differences in opinion about how you should present the information’ [28401 from text unit paragraphs 42-43]

‘The LIS site, with difficulty is the comment I can give for that one! We’ve been struggling with this bit because we had a set of library pages which were developed by someone who got interested in this, and he’s now the university web weaver, but he developed those pages some time back now, before we integrated with academic computing services...If you drill down it gets better but the way it’s presented is abysmal...There’s a current debate going on the way in which the over-arching university web site look and how the school pages integrate into that. There’s no consistent policy on that at the moment and that is being developed as part of our overall information and communication strategy...but that is being developed under the leadership of the Director of Marketing & Communication but the Web Weaver post which is situated within IS is supposed to be the resource supporting that’ [11401 from text unit paragraphs 25-29]

‘There is a steering group...was to look after the college web pages and we used to have to go through them but they trust us now to do our own web pages under staff development. We like being on our own for that’ [14401 from text unit paragraphs 19-20]

‘I want the library catalogue to become the key access route to Internet resources. I want to expand the library web pages, there are already a lot of links, not expand that but increase the interactivity e.g. forms...I’d like to put all our documentation there...’ [30401 from text units 64-69]

‘Well as it happens we run the university web site as well...the web site is managed by ...well we have two job shares in a ways where one of my IT staff and one of my library staff do a double header on it really...predictably the librarian who half of our web management team maintains the pages and pointers and all the other things that make up the content map of our resources...That’s handled rather smoothly and unproblematically here and that person...is highly skilled in authoring...In a sense one of the benefits of convergence is we can integrate these kind of things together...and the computer people begin to understand some of the taxonomic issues and vice versa the librarians start to understand some of the technical issues’ [18401 from text unit paragraphs 221-22]

‘Glancing through the questions I blush in shame. The library does not have a web site, we don’t subscribe to electronic journals. There don’t seem to be many on [name of specialist are]. [31401 from text unit paragraphs 3-5]