In mid-March 2022, Research Libraries UK held a three-day online conference, Mapping the New Open for Research Libraries. The conference offered a great deal of food for thought about the hows and whys of open research. What follows are my notes and reflections on what I learned from the presenters and discussion.
Unfortunately, because it’s been a few months since the conference, my recollection of speakers names is somewhat blurred. My apologies that only some panelists and speakers are named! Fortunately, many of the talks are freely available to watch online, and you can find these linked below in bold text.
The first talk, from Amina Shah, introduced a focus on inviting people into the library and creating partnerships as an important part of what it means for a twenty-first century library to be ‘open’. I particularly appreciated her focus on collaboration, not competition, between major research libraries and their partners across the sector. She also focused on the importance of storytelling as a part of what libraries do, and the fact that the impact and importance of this can often be hard to measure–or as she put it, ‘what’s counted doesn’t count, and what counts can’t be counted’. It sometimes seems that in the library world, data are ever more important for defining what success and achievement looks like, so I found this a helpful and inspiring reminder of the bigger picture in which libraries operate.
This focus on generous and openhearted collaboration made a nice segue to the next panel I attended, Libraries as Partners in Research, which introduced a number of exciting digital projects in which librarians have been involved, including the African Digital Poetry Portal, the Civica European Alliance’s support of Open Science, and Lancaster Digital Collections. I was especially intrigued by this last project, as it is based on an open-source platform, which opens up intriguing possibilities for future projects at my own institution. Another panel later that day, Mapping the International Skills Landscape, kept up the theme of collaboration and sharing information by focusing particularly on the ways that librarians develop their skills on the job and as their roles evolve. In Positive Change in Our Libraries, the three panelists spoke about some of the unforeseen negative consequences of the pandemic, focusing on how ableism, unjust cataloguing practices, and digital exclusion can create a closed library space here an open one should be. I have added watching the documentary Changing the Subject, about efforts to alter the Library of Congress classification headings to respond to social justice concerns, to my summer viewing list.
I returned to my computer on the next day excited for what I would learn next! Libraries and the Next Digital Age focused on a stage of issues: librarians educating their academic communities about issues of AI and ethics (did you know that the plagiarism-checker Turnitin is AI powered? I did not!); and ways to share information and knowledge about cybersecurity issues. One of the speakers made the point that most users of websites like SciHub, which offer pirated access to research materials, have little understanding of what these websites actually are, and the information security risks that they can pose for individuals and institutions. (I wonder if this might be a way to be a better way to discuss the risks of these website than the standard it-breaks-copyright-law argument, which falls flatter than a pancake with most academics I’ve met.) This was nicely followed by Kaitlin Thaney of Invest in Open Infrastructure arguing that open knowledge and the platforms used to access it are not neutral or apolitical; I’ve added their research report The Future of Open Scholarship to my summer reading list.
The final day of the conference came all-too-quickly! In Thriving Digital Society, Susan Halfpenny and Arielle Redman, picked up on the themes of digital skills training that had been addressed in previous talks. I appreciated their overview of the history of how digital changes have affected libraries–we can now do computational analysis of our collections, carry out digital scholarship, publish research, and more! I particularly appreciated panelists’ point that digital transformation in libraries needs to be led by people and not by systems. Projects and initiatives cited include Programming Historian, Library Carpentry, the JISC Digital Capabilities Framework, and the Essential Digital Skills Framework. And thanks to the panelists’ wonderful conversation, I’ve added Technology is Not the Answer to my summer reading list.
Conference participants had been asked to think critically about the skills and platforms which support open access. In his keynote lecture, Christopher Smith took this challenge one step further, asking participants to rethink their notion of openness itself. By introducing the history of scholarly journals as a plan for publication, he reminded everyone that research findings require narrative and context–to truly get the most out of the scholarship available to them, readers need to approach it with knowledge and understanding. Journals, even if they are not always great at being open, are really good at providing connection and community; open scholarship often does the reverse, providing access without necessarily bringing people together. The presentation ended with a call for listeners to consider ethical and responsible approaches for communicating research to broader audiences.
In Engagement and Diversity Through Collections, presenters addressed some of these ethical challenges. Francesca Marini’s talk nicely evoked Amina Shah’s emphasis on collaboration, as she introduced how projects within her library involved building a network to effectively collaborate within members of campus communities. (She shared publications and student reflections provide a model for how this kind of work might be done in the context of library exhibitions). The final two presentations offered discussions of projects on decolonisation and cataloguing at the University of Sussex by Richard Wragg, and expanded access to digital collections at the University of Oxford by Judith Siefring, where researchers currently often need to have prior knowledge and awareness of digital collections in order to find materials. A rich discussion arose afterwards about cataloguing practices, and I added material on reparative cataloguing, Sanford Berman’s Prejudices and Apathies, and the essay collection Radical Cataloguing to my TBR pile. Participants also brought up a collection of case studies of decolonization in UK libraries.
One thing that still–nearly five years into my career–surprises and delights me about librarianship is how much the profession centered around relationships with people, not books. If I had to sum up The New Open, I would say that the conference emphasised how much open scholarship goes beyond data and metrics and technologies and platforms–it is ultimately about creating communities.
Here’s hoping you too have been able to attend conferences which were as enriching and thought-provoking as this one was for me! If you also attended RLUK22, please do leave a comment and let me know what stood out for you.