The future of libraries is… collaborative infrastructure

Within UK higher education, recent sector evidence from UUK suggests that ‘there is a widespread appetite and impetus for increased collaboration across the sector’, driven largely by financial pressure from rising costs, a fall in international student numbers, and structural underfunding.

The report gives collaboration case studies from higher education and both central and local government as examples and as a spur to thinking.  But there’s no mention of libraries and only passing reference to Wales; this post aims to correct those omissions by describing a successful Welsh library collaboration.

Libraries are often ahead of the curve, developing models of joint procurement, shared infrastructure, and service collaboration that could offer lessons for the wider sector.

A useful example from Wales comes from the Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum (WHELF), a partnership that brings together the nation’s 9 university libraries, the National Library of Wales, the Open University Wales and NHS Wales libraries. Its work demonstrates how collaboration can deliver institutional benefits: cost savings through shared procurement leading to a common IT infrastructure which drives collaboration and shared services.

One of WHELF’s most significant achievements has been the joint procurement of a single library management system, which is now used across the partnership.  This library management system is what drives much of what libraries do, from purchasing resources to making them available to students and researchers.  Before this joint procurement there were 6 separate library management systems in use across WHELF partners, with limited interoperability constraining collaboration opportunities.

If WHELF had done no more than jointly procure the system, it would have achieved benefits.  A big buying club, with financial muscle, is attractive to suppliers, and WHELF was able to use this to drive implementation, subscription and annual uplift savings.  An independent evaluation showed that this collaborative approach has delivered around £1.8 million in annual subscription savings across the consortium during the first twelve years of the contract. These are meaningful savings for institutions operating in a constrained financial environment.

But, the financial case is only part of the story. A shared system also creates a common technical infrastructure that allows institutions to work together far more effectively. Instead of each university operating in isolation, partners can align processes, share expertise and training, and develop services collectively. This reduces duplication of effort and drives savings for all; in particular, it enables smaller institutions to benefit from expertise that might otherwise be beyond their reach and from a functionally rich library management system that might have been beyond their reach if procuring alone.

For senior leaders outside the library profession, the significance of this model may lie in what it suggests for the future of joint procurement and enterprise systems more broadly.

The joint procurement of a library management system in Wales demonstrates that collaboration on core institutional systems can work in practice.  Where libraries are leading, could others follow? Could shared procurement and governance deliver savings and resilience for multi-institution finance systems or student platforms, for example, whilst maintaining institutional identity and competitiveness?

The WHELF example also shows that shared procurement, leading to a common IT infrastructure, can drive more collaboration and enable service innovation.  

Building on the success of the joint procurement and implementation, including recognition at the THELMAs, the shared system underpinning WHELF has made possible a free peer-to-peer interlending scheme,  known as WHELF+. Originally launched as a Wales-wide initiative, the service allows students and researchers to borrow material for free and directly from partner institutions when their home library does not hold it.

The scheme has since expanded significantly, with 39 member organisations across the UK and the US enjoying over £500,000 in collective cost savings for participating institutions while dramatically expanding access to academic resources. Importantly, the service also proved resilient during disruption, continuing to support researchers when the British Library’s national document supply services were unavailable for months following a cyber attack.

For university leaders thinking about sectoral challenges and opportunities, they could do worse than look to what libraries are doing. Library collaborations demonstrate how institutions maintain their distinct identities and competitiveness whilst reducing costs, improving access to resources, and building more resilient services.

About the author

Gareth Owen is interim Director of Libraries at Cardiff University and chairs the library management system collaboration across all 9 universities in Wales, the National Library of Wales and the NHS Wales.  He has worked across a range of libraries, including the Welsh Senedd and the House of Commons, as well as in policy and legislative roles in Welsh Government.