The whole sector needs to work together

THE choice was either to teach a procurement expert about libraries or to teach a librarian about procurement. Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC) took the second option and Gavin Phillips – until very recently the Acquisitions Services Manager at Imperial College London – started work at SUPC in January and will start his diploma this month (February).

Gavin has already had a long relationship with SUPC and says its mission is “not just to create lots of framework agreements that universities can access, but to ensure our frameworks and other solutions provide value for money and value to students” adding that “my own role is also to add value to the university sector as a whole, not just bring in more spend to a framework agreement – so making that framework more appropriate to the library sector. It’s a large piece of work involving sector engagement.”

The nudge
One aim is to find flexibility and grow common ground between suppliers and university libraries. For example, how procurement regulations might support a system in which buyers can expect changes and improvements while also giving suppliers a chance to signal their intentions and carry them out. “We shouldn’t just assume that they can make that change by snapping their fingers and we don’t want them to get to a point where they can’t get on the framework anymore.” He says, “So we can use procurement to nudge development without making it mandatory and that’s one of the nuances. It will come down to what is compliant with regulations and what isn’t.” (This article is one of many in the CILIP 2020 Buyers' Guide)

Metadata
One problematic area he hopes to help SUPC and other consortia address is metadata. “Ebooks have not been treated in the same way as the print books and there is a bit of a disconnect between different parts of the supply chain,” he says. “The bibliographic records we use for discovery for students for ebooks are often very far away from the standards we’d like to see and students don’t get the best search results. Some books may not appear or be too far down the results to be seen, or you have inconsistencies and two editions appear miles from each other.” But he says there is a lot of metadata work going on in the sector. Jisc is working on issues relating to the National Bibliographic Knowledge Base and the National Acquisitions Group are looking at the framework and Gavin expects to be working on how to meet their recommendations in a way that is workable for suppliers.



“There are some elements that they should be able to implement now,” he says “But lots of suppliers won’t be able to improve things in the time frame of the tender so we would use questions: maybe get them to commit to certain things by a certain date. For example ask “can you do this?” but in a way that is not scored. It would allow libraries to say ‘I only want to work with the vendors who say yes to this.’ That way they save themselves the effort of considering people who don’t meet the requirement. And when you can do that it triggers more development in the framework among the suppliers.” Gavin added that the metadata challenge was a specialist one and at Imperial he had been “working with a specialist to ensure proper understanding and translating that to appropriate requirements for suppliers.”

Innovation
Gavin’s last big job at Imperial was implementing Rialto, a Proquest tool that will be embedded into the existing Alma Library Management System. “When libraries are looking to buy books they do it through their suppliers’ website which sends information back to our LMS. Rialto will put that market place directly into the LMS. It means there is no interoperability between the two systems, they will be the same system. We will no longer have to use APIs or EPIs to transfer information between systems which can be unstable and take over night to happen. It’s ­allowed Proquest to start from scratch with the workflow and find pain points in the current workflow. It’s all a bit early days but they are embedding better analytics and talking about things like machine learning. The aim is intelligent recommendations to make sure you buy things that will be used based on the usage of your existing collections and potentially usage of collections at peer libraries at other institutions. It will need people to sign up to that but potentially you can start to get recommendations on what there is actually evidence for in either your own or a similar institution.” He said the work is new with no similar products on the market. “It’s developing around Proquest’s own systems and supply but it should be vendor neutral because in the US EBSCO provides the lion’s share and US partners aren’t just going to change their supplier, so it needs to be able to accommodate other vendors.

Cost of innovation
The read across from this work is hopeful about the value of relationships, but less optimistic about the sector’s capacity to innovate. “This work on Rialto came out of the supplier relationship side of my job. When Proquest’s Vice President of books was over from the US he said they were looking to do something along these lines and I said let us know because we’d probably want to be a development partner. A few months later it materialised. Something like Rialto is taking about half a day a week which is not too bad for us but for a lot of libraries the time is not there…
Library teams have shrunk over the last ten years and work load has grown. It’s a tough world out there but Imperial is somewhat sheltered from the harshness. It’s a comparatively rich institution and research led so most of our income doesn’t come from the government it comes from sources such as research grants.”

Can suppliers help?
“There are institutions out there that can get involved in things. Imperial does quite a lot of development work either formally or informally but there are plenty of others out there and even if institutions can only do it occasionally. The appetite is certainly there, it’s just that the capacity sometimes isn’t. From a supplier point of view the more they can do to improve services without having to do a two-year project that requires half a day a week the more they can do of that the better. There are pain points in the processes at the moment. And they are there for all sorts of different reasons. Sometimes its people with older LMS that can’t handle the more effective ways of working – sometimes it’s the metadata provided by book suppliers, particularly ebook suppliers is often completely rotten and that means that library teams are often having to do that manually… the metadata.” So, any developments in relationships with suppliers could have knock on impacts on university library capacity to innovate. This is the kind of outcome that a holistic, flexible view of the sector and its suppliers might help identify and achieve.

New curriculum
Pressure on library staff and buying skills is coming from other directions too. “The general work of my team is acquiring books and ebooks for the library, processing reading lists into resource and deciding how many books and ebooks to buy. It’s a huge piece of work and it’s a growing one. That’s because Imperial is going through a period of curriculum review. A lot of teaching is changing and we’re having to buy a lot of stuff to support that teaching.” Imperial’s learning and teaching strategy was launched a couple of years ago. It’s aiming for a more blended learning experience than lectures, notes and reading - something more interactive and which supports more people. “It’s an issue that just about everyone has been looking at,” Gavin says, “We’re seeing a lot of new resources. For example, rather than recommending a textbook, it’s just a chapter, and so we’re looking at how we can get chapters digitised rather than making a print book available. It’s adding to the workload because its new and it’s working its way through.” Gavin adds that this area “could be a big theme for SUPC. It does make a change to things and people are buying fewer print books, skewing things digitally with spending swinging from print to digital.”

Buyer’s career path
Gavin is leaving Imperial after 21 years. “The replacement in my role will be recruited at a grade above me,” he says. “From an HR point of view that grade better reflects the strategic nature of what I’ve been doing. My role has become a lot more strategic than it used to be, less process based, focusing on what can support effective workflows, and I’ve been working with the SUPC for a number of years as a librarian who contributes to their tender processes, managing the contracts and things like that. It’s really important to be able to see what trends are out there and what services and functionality might be coming and to engage with suppliers about what our requirements are. Once you get to the post above mine you are into library leadership which is a lot more strategic and wider in scope and will rely on managers like myself to have the expertise to go out and engage with the sector.”

Horizon scan
Gavin sets out three keys areas he could be looking at in his first year. One is the metadata problem discussed above, another is E textbooks. “The pricing is in the control of the publishers and they are extremely expensive so I will be looking at ways to put more power into institutional hands.” The other thing is Open Access. “Plan S is extremely complex but there are a lot of funding bodies behind it so broadly speaking if you want their funding you need to publish your outcomes in an open access journal. The challenge for SUPC will be that the money is probably still being spent – for example in article processing charges, but not through our traditional subscriptions agents. So how do they protect their revenue and what services can they provide to institutions? APCs take up a huge amount of time so may be there is a role for subscription agents handling APCs on behalf of institutions, that’s something to explore.”

SUPC is a membership-based procurement organisation that provides high quality frameworks and value adding services to its members and the sector as a whole. SUPC is one division of the SUMS Group, which works to support universities across the UK. You can learn more at www.supc.ac.uk