Are information services fighting for survival?
Posted on August 25th, 2010 by Caroline Williams
As, Intute enters its final maintenance year, I have spent a long time reflecting on the events that led us here. With public sector organisations and higher education facing the possibility of further cuts, I think that it is timely to share some of those reflections in the context of demonstrating value for money and the search for new business models.
During my career, I have seen continuous technological, social and educational change and my information professional colleagues have re-invented themselves and their services. We have worked to (amongst other things): reconcile business management practices with service delivery within academic cultures; adopt student and researcher centric practices; deploy new kinds of technical search and retrieval tools; and embrace electronic collection development and content digitisation. And we have delivered on this, and all against the backdrop of increasing search engine dominance.
When the government public sector funding cuts hit, many of us working in higher education information services became only too aware of the new challenges ahead. We are being pushed to articulate our continuing relevance, to demonstrate value for money, and in some cases to go further and find alternative business models for previously publicly funded services.
So what did this mean for Intute?
Organisational effectiveness and efficiency
In many ways Intute was a success. At its height across the academic year for 2008/9, 34.5 million keyword searches alone were carried out. As an organization we evolved into a strong distributed network of expertise, undertaking a number of innovative projects as well as delivering on our core service. Sound familiar? We invested in team development, set time aside for facilitated strategy setting, had healthy and constructive disagreements, and got more savvy about using our meeting time. With input from Deborah Dalley and Associates and Lucidus Consulting, we managed complex strands of work across seven institutional offices using the Office of Government Commerce’s (OGC) Managing Successful Programmes (MSP), and became more efficient to the tune of 15% per year whilst continuing to innovate.
Funding cuts and new business models
Ultimately, these efficiencies could not protect us against funding cuts, and we lost funding from the ESRC and the AHRC before the withdrawal of support from JISC. I knew that Intute would need to find alternative sources of money if it were going to survive, and that would mean exploring alternative business models. However, this was a completely new way of thinking for us, and we struggled to translate our research into practice. Two attempts to recruit a business development officer failed, and so we decided to bring in an independent consultancy to help us. They proposed that diminishing library budgets would make introducing a subscription for Intute as it stood unrealistic, and the UK’s economic instability would scupper investigations into advertising and sponsorship. Frustratingly, they concluded that grant funding was the most appropriate fit for a service such as ours.
Value for money
To be successful in attracting new and continued grant funding we needed to innovate and provide demonstrable value for money. Not a dilemma but difficult to quantify. Our unique selling point of human selection and evaluation of Web sites was expensive, and perhaps unfashionable in an environment dominated by social media and free contribution. The cost of human selection of websites suitable for use in academia, and the associated creation of metadata to enable search and retrieval, is no longer considered to be value for money. Yet how can we quantify value for money. A consultancy undertaken by Lucidus Consulting regarding value for money gave us food for thought. This is what they said:
Value for money is normally considered in relation to the “thing” or “good” provided. In the case of Intute, this is virtually impossible to verify since the service – beyond accuracy, integrity, completeness and timeliness – can only be qualified in subjective and perceptual terms. The term “value for money” is a difficult notion for the service provided by Intute … There can be no black-and-white answers to the value for money question in relation to its true purpose – education and learning.
The perfect storm
Like a perfect storm, the forces of search engine dominance, a lack of alternative business models, limited business development expertise, and the costs of associated with manual creation of metadata (compounded by lack of an automated alternative), collided to drown Intute as we know it.
For me, the question that presents more wider cause for concern is “Is Intute’s demise an omen of a wider trend for library and information services funding?” Is it that the market can no longer value the services we provide in comparison to other things? I’d like to leave you with a presentation by Dan Greenstien, who gave the opening keynote at the Survive or Thrive conference in June. He encouraged university librarians to think about “what kind of investments institutions will and will not make in their libraries when funding is scarce.” I think this is a question that we will all be forced to answer.
[talk] Dan Greenstein at Survive or Thrive conference from UKOLN on Vimeo.
