CILIP Big Day 2012 – Speaker four - Digital Access for All, Ann Rossiter from SCONUL

Digital Access for All strand – talk two, Ann Rossiter, Executive Director, SCONUL

Talk entitled - Reasons to be cheerful… in three parts

She started by talking about Ian Dury and a solar powered park bench in London with earphones through which you could hear various of his musical tracks.

She then talked about three exciting initiatives underway

Part 1) Digital Public Library of America – this was a project that started in the 1990s, hugely ambitious, mission to make all cultural and scientific heritage of America accessible free of charge on the internet.  Driven by public and academic libraries, open to everyone, build stage starting next year. It has six workstreams, from the printed record to sound. Content being taken from existing public domain plus mass digitisation of other works. Would provide a central gateway to all existing resources. Shows what can be done with digital access.

Part 2) Professor Ian Hargreaves report on intellectual property and copyright reform – report about stopping copyright being a barrier, quietly transformative, adopted by government. Allows for digital copyright exchange, liberation of orphan works, mining text and data, new uses for copyright.

Part 3) Dame Janet Finch’s report on Accessiblity, Sustainability, Excellence. About opening up peer review of academic journals and access to research findings, controversial report, but Research Council says it won’t fund any project not available to everyone within six months, so it’s having an impact on opening up delivery mechanisms and access.

She argued the UK needs to develop a National Digital Library for the UK, models in place which are interesting to look at such as SHEDL in Scotland in the academic library community, work happening with OCLC…  If we don’t do this then others will do it to us, in our interest to own and shape it for our own ends.

She said what everything she had talked about had in common was to illustrate a fundamental change, a transformation of power. Knowledge and information had moved from needing gatekeepers to being an open door – this changed our role to collating, providing access, guiding – we have more ownership now, all the players in the debate need to work together on how best we utilise it.