Library futures: University of Oxford | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional

"The Bodleian is more than just a university library – it is first and foremost an institution that supports research and learning for our own scholarly community in Oxford. But it also serves as a national library, with major obligations for preservation and dissemination of knowledge. It's an international cultural and scientific institution in its own right, engaging in major collaborative projects ranging from international exhibitions, to data analysis, digitisation, and scientific investigation ... The Bodleian's problems and its great strengths both stem from the reality of its vast scale: maintaining major collections, buildings, skills, and scope of activity requires equally considerable resources to sustain and develop them – financial, human, and intellectual. As higher education becomes increasingly global and connected, and as the use of digital media expands and changes so rapidly, keeping pace with the demands of users at all levels is a major challenge for the Bodleian, especially when graduate students and researchers come with high expectations from their previous institutions which may have libraries which are better resourced.  Resourcing a large library at a time of financial constraint is hard, but we are fortunate to have a well developed fundraising programme – for capital activities, research projects, and endowment building – that has built up serious momentum in recent years, but needs to perform at an even higher level in the future ... Just as challenging as coping with major projects is the long term issue of matching the intellectual demands of our work with the skills of our staff. As we grapple with both familiar challenges and newer ones – such as open access, copyright and IPR, digital preservation, and research data management – we need to strengthen legal, technical, and project management skills in our organisation ,,, The speed in which the open access (OA) policies have been developed and implemented poses major headaches for institutions like Oxford, as library staff cope both with keeping academics up to date with the shifting sands of hastily developed policies and the differing responses of myriad publishers. It's also difficult to keep track of the funds given to support gold OA and make it as swift and easy as possible for our scholars to go down the green OA route. At the same time, skills such as palaeography and codicology are still highly sought after and librarians have increasingly rare skills to impart to new generations of researchers.  As more and more of our scholars want us to archive blogs and websites, help them with data archiving or visualisation, or enable their editorial collaboration with three other universities in multiple time-zones, we need to help shape the skills-set of our staff to cope with these new demands while maintaining (even extending) existing specialist knowledge and expertise in subjects, languages and collections.  As we move further into our fifth century as a library, our challenges can be summed up in one sentence: matching the legacy of the past with the promise of the future."