Find out what buyers and providers are saying about technology, ethics, careers, start-ups, pop-up banks and more CILIP’s Annual Buyers’ Guide Directory 2024, which will be delivered with your January/February issue of Information Professional.

WITH technology playing a huge role in the way knowledge and information is gathered, stored and accessed, so information professionals and their suppliers are developing new skills, new products and new services.

As part of the We are CILIP strategy, CILIP is helping information professionals in all sectors to release the value fuelled by data and information for their organisations, communities. The Annual Buyers’ Guide is one of the tools that it is using to enable this. The magazine includes buyer-focused articles featured next to our comprehensive listings of the sectors’ suppliers.

While inviting professionals and providers into thoughtful dialogue, sharing their experiences of the sector, the Buyers’ Guide showcases the latest services and products on offer, addressing the many challenges faced by our members.

Suppliers

As part of its role as a professional body CILIP has spent decades building up relationships with its members – the sector’s employers, and its suppliers. The Buyers’ Guide is an opportunity to look more closely at our supplier relationships and the relationships they have with our members. It is also a platform to showcase the many companies and organisations that operate in the sector. This year’s Buyers’ Guide features 142 suppliers whose products and services are dispersed among nearly 50 categories from accessibility products to youth library suppliers.

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Find out more about CILIP’s Supplier Partners and how they can help you.

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There are currently 30 members of CILIP’s Supplier Partner Scheme, representing a broad mix of LMS vendors, digital suppliers, design and fit-out suppliers, book and ebook suppliers, data brokers and service providers.

The partnership scheme (www.cilip.org.uk/SupplierPartners) allows suppliers to forge more meaningful connections with buyers, through a range of CILIP activities and events. As well as a featuring in the Buyers’ Guide and Information Professional, suppliers can take advantage of space at CILIP’s Conferences and supplier showcases to demonstrate their products and services and make meaningful face-to-face connections with buyers.

Accessing the markets Despite the pandemic and worrying financial outlook, global trends suggest there could be significant increases in library expenditure in a number of key territories across the world, including Europe. Suppliers are looking for enhanced reach and impact by improving their sector profile in order to get better access to potential markets. CILIP’s package is designed to help vendors seeking more meaningful opportunities to engage with their audience, demonstrate thought leadership and position their products or services as solutions to real-world problems.

These opportunities are on offer to traditional and new players in the market. Technology as well as consolidation in the market has resulted in big changes but it has been counteracted by a growth in new vendors with a specific focus on innovation and technology.

We have an interview with the CEO of Keenious, Frode Opdahl who not only explains how the uses AI to find research relevant to any document, but also shares his experience of the start-up process, and the complexities of moving into new markets. In the piece he also explains how investors see the library sector, and the role that buyers in big institutions can play in helping start-ups.

Market movers

All our thousands of members’ work is impacted by procurement processes and so are their clients – whether that’s members of the public, students, academics or other professionals. And an increasingly important aspect of the work done by the hundreds of information professionals involved specifically in buying, is to align the ethical – equity and social justice, and sustainability – as well as the practical and financial needs of their communities, with the suppliers.

With consortia writing-up new purchasing frameworks that include new environmental or social conditions, sectors are incorporating the concerns of their communities into the buying process. In the absence of legislation, it is sometimes up to our members to work out where challenges lie and how to get changes in motion. In this issue we talk to Caroline Ball, Academic Librarian, University of Derbyshire and #ebooksos campaigner about how transparency over the use of data by some vendors needs to be addressed, and how the sector could mobilise to do it.

For vendors themselves, the dynamics of the library market makes it a rich area for innovation. For example, last year we looked at the academic sector’s Plan B in its negotiations with Elsevier, a process that invigorated relationships with new providers as well as existing ones.

While focused on the procurement and acquisitions officers within the academic, public, health and industrial library sectors, the pace of change in technology and society has meant a blurring of disciplines and roles.

CILIP’s membership and its areas of interest and influence are changing fast, as are the skills needed in librarianship and archives and our members working in knowledge and information management and other specialist information roles.

This year’s content reflects some of this edge blurring.

We speak to buyer Matt Cox, recently appointed as Head of Content Delivery and Discovery at Anglia Ruskin University, talks about the career itself, and how the skills required can come from other sectors, how to work with colleagues and keep aligned with their needs. He says aptitude and skills are becoming more important as the pool.

In public libraries much of the innovation is driven by financial pressures and in many cases this falls at the door of the buyers. We talk to Russel Barrow, Principal Librarian, Operations: West about how Hertfordshire library services have facilitated pop-up banking and how helpful training has been in developing a commercial strategy that keeps the public library ethos intact.

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