Peter Fox
6.1 Introduction
In 1982 informal discussions took place between Dr Fred Ratcliffe, Librarian of the University of Cambridge, and Douglas Foskett, Goldsmiths Librarian, University of London, about the need for the sharing of machine-readable records between the major research libraries of the United Kingdom. Those discussions were extended to involve representatives of other libraries, and in the following year the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) was born. At that time, and for a number of years to follow, CURL was a fairly informal grouping of the seven largest university libraries in the country (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, London, Manchester and Oxford). The libraries had come together to “explore the possibilities of closer co-operation, particularly, but not exclusively in the use of automation”, and it was the devel- opment and maintenance of the catalogue database that occupied most of the energies of CURL until the beginning of the 1990s. The early history of the orga- nization, the reasons for its establishment, and a description of activities in its first decade is given in Ratcliffe and Foskett (1989).
Today, almost a quarter of a century after its foundation, CURL has become a very different animal. It has grown from seven to 29 members; its agenda is a very much broader one; its role and influence have expanded immensely. From being viewed with some suspicion as a club for the elite and (as one wit described it, rather unkindly but not entirely without justification) as the “Con- sortium for Unusually Rich Lunches”, CURL has become a major force in aca- demic librarianship, not just in the British Isles but on the world stage, with an agenda that seeks to promote its collections and expertise for the benefit of scholarship as a whole, regardless of whether that scholarship resides in its member institutions or, indeed, in these islands.
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6.2 History of CURL
The history of CURL for at least the first decade of its existence was largely the history of the database and, despite the efforts of a number of its members, chiefly Henry Heaney, Librarian of the University of Glasgow, to extend the activities of the organization to encompass other areas where the major research libraries had common interests, the problems of maintaining and funding an ever-growing database dominated CURL’s agenda. A number of factors led to the creation of a climate in which a change could take place, with the database continuing to underpin many of CURL’s activities but no longer demanding all its attention. Those factors included the successful bid to JISC (the Joint Information Services Committee of the higher education funding councils) for funding to support and develop the database, the growth in CURL’s membership, consortial membership of the Research Libraries Group (RLG), and the appointment of full-time CURL staff.
Undoubtedly the most significant single innovation that enabled the organiza- tion to develop its agenda was the appointment in 1997 of a full-time Executive Secretary. A full-time officer with the responsibility of managing the database had been appointed in 1995 and the Database Officer has remained an essential role within CURL ever since. However, CURL had been established as an infor- mal grouping, and that remained its hallmark until 1997, with the running of the consortium regarded as a part-time activity. The original Chairman and Secretary were Dennis Cox, Librarian of the University of Leeds, and Douglas Foskett respectively, both of whom remained in office after retirement from their full-time jobs. They stood down in 1991 and were succeeded as Chairman by Brenda Moon, Librarian of the University of Edinburgh, and as Secretary by Reg Carr, Cox’s successor at Leeds.
Although a part-time Assistant Secretary had been appointed at Leeds, the running of CURL essentially devolved upon its secretary between 1991 and 1997 – an enormous and sometimes unreasonable demand upon someone who was also running a major university library. It is a tribute to Reg Carr’s ability and sheer hard work that CURL and Leeds both flourished during that period. During the same period, CURL doubled in size from its original seven members and became a company limited by guarantee, with formal articles of association and charitable status. By 1996, however, it was clear that the orga- nization had become too large and the demands and expectations of its mem- bers too diverse for this part-time administration to continue to operate effectively.
In 1997 Clare Jenkins was appointed as CURL’s first full-time Executive Secre- tary and a CURL office was established in the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics. At the same time, the management committee was replaced by a new Board of directors, with Peter Fox, Librarian of the University of Cambridge, as its first Chairman. The struc- ture of the organization has remained essentially the same since then, with the only change being the move of the CURL office, first to the University of Glas- gow, and then, in 2002, to the University of Birmingham.
6.3 CURL’s First Strategic Plan
CURL’s first formally-articulated strategic plan, for the period 1997–2000, consciously sought to expand the range of activities that the organization would undertake, and placed responsibility for implementation in the hands of three steering groups, each chaired by a member of the Board. The key areas of activity were: resource description and discovery, access to CURL resources and resource management. The plan has been revised several times since it was formulated, but much of CURL’s work can still be accommodated within those three strands, though with different emphases and with the addition of some new areas that could not have been envisaged in the mid 1990s.
“Resource description and discovery” was an extension of CURL’s originalrai- son d’être, the database of catalogue records. The database was growing rapidly and was a major source of cataloguing data, not just for CURL libraries but for non-CURL members as well. COPAC, its online catalogue, had become a stan- dard tool, heavily used both within the UK higher education community and outside it and had become “a major international showcase for the resources of United Kingdom academic libraries” (Field, 1999, 140). In 1998 JISC confirmed that COPAC should become a core element of its national dataset service, MIDAS, based at the University of Manchester. Both COPAC and its underlying database have now become effectively a UK national union catalogue, especially with the addition of the British Library’s database, and at the time of writing (2006) the CURL database contains almost 50 million records.
Retrospective conversion – the transfer of records from card and printed cata- logues into online form – became a growing priority as users increasingly expected to be able to find records for books via online databases. In 1999 CURL successfully bid for over £500,000 from the higher education funding councils’
Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) to automate or create original records for 19th-century pamphlets held in 15 member libraries and two non- CURL institutions. The project was completed in 2002, with almost 180,000 records added to COPAC and made freely accessible to anyone.
The need to carry out further retrospective conversion remains a live issue today for many libraries, and after lengthy discussion with the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), CURL launched the Britain in Print Project as a pilot in 2003. It is now in its second phase, which will run until 2007. Supported by the HLF, and led by the University of Edinburgh, the project will create electronic records for all 40,000 pre-1700 British books in the ten participating libraries and will deliver these though a web-based catalogue. By the end of the project around 42,000 new online catalogue records will have been created. The project will also produce online learning materials targeted at schools and drawing on the resources represented by these records.
The demand for online access to catalogue records is not confined to those for printed materials. In 1999, JISC awarded funding to CURL and the universities of Liverpool and Manchester to develop a Higher Education Archives Hub. Fif- teen universities provided content for the pilot project, most of it collection-
level descriptions but some in the form of full finding aids. By 2001 the pilot had become a service, and the Archives Hub now provides a single point of access to almost 20,000 descriptions of archives held in over 150 UK institutions, forming part of the national archives network. The service continues to be a CURL-sup- ported activity, with the database hosted at the University of Manchester and systems development work undertaken at the University of Liverpool.
The second of the three main strands in the 1997–2000 strategic plan was “access to resources”. In 1996 CURL had undertaken an initiative to draw attention to the riches in the collections of its members by publishing aGuide to the research collec- tions of member libraries, which provided a subject-based overview of the collec- tions of the then 13 CURL libraries (Pickering, 1996). Each library was also encouraged to bring to the attention of its users the availability of the resources of the other CURL libraries via their guides for readers, web links, etc. The consortium itself sought “to develop enhanced access, for research purposes, to CURL’s com- bined information resources through physical and virtual access and through doc- ument delivery” (Thomson, 1999, 144). A group was established to investigate the feasibility of an inter-library-loan service based on the records in COPAC. This was the first of several, so far abortive, attempts by CURL to set up inter-library-loans and document-supply services based on the holdings of its members.
The third strand was “resource management”. Initial activities included work to map collection strengths, to promote the formulation by member libraries of collection-development policies, and to develop the deeper collaboration known as “collaborative collection management”, which was one of the strands of the RSLP programme (Naylor, 1999). One of that programme’s projects, COCOREES (COllaborative COllection management project for Russian and East European Studies), led by the University of Oxford, ran from 1999 to 2002, with a membership of 12 partner libraries, most of them CURL members. The CURL Board felt that the project’s experience might enable it to serve as a test- bed and demonstration platform for further collaborative collection manage- ment initiatives and in 2002 a newly scoped project, CURL-CoFoR, (Collabora- tion For Research) began. This has now become an established service offering researchers in Russian and East European Studies a nationwide database of library collections and journal holdings in the UK.
Within the context of resource management, CURL’s approach to the issue of preservation of the collections of member libraries was a good example of how the consortium recognized a need but also realized that, rather than try to do everything itself, it could achieve more through the development of strategic alliances and support for other bodies. In 1995 it had been agreed that CURL would become one of the group of institutions providing funding for the National Preservation Office (NPO), and the CURL Board took the view that, rather than duplicate the work of the NPO it would work with that organization by bringing to its attention projects that it felt were important for the research library community and by supporting the NPO in carrying them out.
In the area of digital archiving, however, CURL recognized that it had expertise within its member libraries that enabled it to play a leading role in research into this new and rapidly developing area, and was successful in obtaining funding
from JISC for the CEDARS project (CURL Exemplars in Digital ARchiveS). The project, which ran from 1998 to 2002, was a joint one between the universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Oxford. Its principal objective was to explore digital preservation issues and, by the time its funding came to an end, it had become a world leader, publishing important guidance documents on digital preserva- tion strategies, distributed digital archiving, preservation metadata, digital col- lection management and intellectual-property issues. in the development of standards for metadata (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars).
The link with the National Preservation Office represented one of a number of strategic alliances, the most important of which was that with the Research Libraries Group (RLG). The activities of RLG were felt to be particularly rele- vant to CURL’s needs and all CURL members were required also to become RLG members; this requirement was rescinded only in 2006 with the incorporation of RLG into OCLC. RLG had extensive experience in digital information man- agement, preservation and conservation, and resource sharing, as well as offer- ing access to the RLIN database of members’ holdings for public access) and record retrieval and access to other databases that are significant for research.
The attachment to the UK of an RLG staff member from 1996 to 2002 proved extremely valuable for CURL, and staff members from CURL libraries benefited from attending RLG symposia and meetings, and from placements in RLG member libraries in the United States. The election in 1999 of Reg Carr to chair the RLG Board demonstrated clearly the position of influence that CURL and its member librarians had achieved within an organization that, from being pre- dominantly North American in outlook and membership, had become more overtly international in approach.
6.4 CAUL
The development of strategic alliances was not limited to links with North America. In 1999 the librarians of ten CURL libraries participated in a study tour organized by CAUL, the Council of Australian University Librarians, which included visits to CAUL institutions in Brisbane, Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney. A number of issues emerged which influenced CURL’s future strategic thinking, particularly the Australian approach to resource sharing, the possi- bility of global collaboration with “like” communities of research institutions, as well as a number of initiatives in curriculum development, which were subse- quently pursued on a bilateral basis between CURL and CAUL members. The return visit from CAUL members to the UK took place in 2000 and this allowed the discussions that had started the previous year to continue.
6.5 SCONUL
Closer to home, the relationship between CURL and SCONUL (Society of College, National and University Libraries) – a potentially divisive one for
academic libraries in these islands – has been remarkably smooth. All CURL members are also members of SCONUL and officers of the two organizations meet regularly to review the most effective approach to issues of concern. It has been agreed that SCONUL would in general take the lead in playing a national role in the case of issues that affected other academic libraries as much as CURL members. Typical of these are copyright, health libraries, and access issues. In more specialized areas, such as preservation, CURL assumes the leading role.
6.6 Wolfson Foundation
The importance of the CURL members within the UK’s research library scene was recognized in 1996 by the award from the Wolfson Foundation of £450,000 to nine CURL libraries to allow them to establish Wolfson Technology Resource Centres. The initial grant was followed by similar grants to the four new members which had missed the first round of bidding. In 2005 the Foundation again agreed to provide £6–10 million over a period of three to five years to assist CURL member libraries in improving access to, and long-term preserva- tion of, their collections.
6.7 SPARC
Following a strategic review in 2000, the topic “scholarly communications” was added to the portfolio of activities, and a number of initiatives were undertaken to encourage more effective dissemination of the research output of universi- ties. CURL joined SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an alliance of universities, research libraries and other organizations established to address the problems of the current scholarly communication system. In 2001 CURL, in association with LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européenes de Recherche) and a number of other European partners, estab- lished SPARC Europe, which co-operates closely with the US parent organiza- tion. CURL also organized advocacy events in 14 member institutions, at which the spiralling costs of journals, e-print archives and other alternative publishing methods such as open-access, were debated.
6.8 SHERPA
In 2002 CURL part-funded the SHERPA project (Securing a Hybrid Environ- ment for Research Preservation and Access), hosted by the University of Nottingham as part of the JISC FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Reposito- ries) Programme. SHERPA, which forms an important strand of the CURL advocacy campaign on scholarly communication, has encouraged the develop- ment of openly accessible institutional digital repositories of research output in a number of member libraries.
Also in 2002, the British Library and the national libraries of Scotland and Wales, that had been associate members of CURL, became full members, and the organization dropped “university” from its title, becoming the Consortium of Research Libraries in the British Isles.
6.9 British Library
Greater use of electronic journals, especially by scientists, has resulted in a decline in usage of some printed materials such as scientific journals, and this, together with the growing pressure on storage space in research libraries, led CURL and the British Library to commission a study in early 2005 to investigate different possible approaches to the storage of printed materials in UK research libraries, particularly those in higher education. The study established that there was a shortage of storage space and recommended that a collaborative approach, the creation of a “UK research reserve”, would be in the best interests of all stakeholders. A joint CURL/British Library working party was established to explore the feasibility of such a development and in November 2006 the joint group was successful in obtaining funding from the higher education funding councils to support an “early adopters” scheme to test the business model, carry out advocacy work and develop guidelines to assist libraries in collection- management decisions in respect of low-use materials. This project is an early example of collaboration with the newly-established Research Libraries Network, now the Research Information Network, which looks set to be a major feature of CURL activities in the future.
6.10 JISC
When CURL was established in 1982, one of the principal factors that made it distinctive was the importance of the collections of its member libraries. As we move into an increasingly digital age, the significance of those collections has, if anything, increased, as users expect to have access to the holdings of the world’s great libraries via the Internet. An indication of this came with the announce- ment by JISC in late 2006 that it would be providing funding to meet the costs of digitizing the full content of the 19th-century pamphlets in CURL libraries whose catalogue records had been automated with an RSLP grant between 1999 and 2002.
6.11 Conclusion
For many libraries a move into a more or less totally digital future is a serious possibility. The research libraries in membership of CURL have to embrace that digital future, whilst at the same time ensuring that they provide for the stew- ardship of their collections in traditional print and manuscript form. The