Moving Plan M Forwards – We Need Your Help! | Jisc Library services

So … I know we’re in the middle of a global pandemic; and the UK is in lockdown; and everyone has got a lot on their minds … BUT, we do need to press on with Plan M! If anyone hasn’t heard of it, or needs a reminder of what it is, feel free to take a look at this previous blog post.

Very briefly, the objective is to remodel the UK library bibliographic metadata marketplace to streamline the supply of – and the demand for – catalogue records. We want to design new agreements between suppliers and libraries that allow the latter to more freely share and reuse bibliographic data. Whilst we now have a fit-for-purpose piece of national infrastructure to facilitate that sharing (you can read about the National Bibliographic Knowledgebase in this blog post) we are still faced with the frustrating situation where data can be enhanced by one library but they aren’t allowed to share that work with other libraries because the original record is subject to licensing restrictions.