OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS AT WARWICK

To explain the background at Warwick, I should say that since the library opened, we have maintained a selective collection of printed official publications, purchasing all material in the HMSO/TSO subject categories which are relevant to academic departments at the University of Warwick. The collection is arranged by our own in-house classification, which was intended to keep material together by category, but it does not make for easy navigation. The collection is expanding constantly, but our building is not, so we are running out of room and our budget is constantly being trimmed. This situation must be very familiar to many of you!

When I first worked at Warwick we had a law and official publications enquiry desk on the law subject floor, and we dealt with a respectable number of enquiries, mainly in term time. Often we were effectively performing a fetching service because students had found details of an official report but could not make sense of the shelf order – at other times the enquiries were more in-depth. Requests for help with finding official publications have greatly reduced, but I do not know if this is because students are mainly using online sources, or they look for printed reports and give up without asking for help. Students may never see the information on our website about official publications, as the category may not seem to be relevant or interesting, but often it would be, if only they knew about it – official publications cover such a very broad range of subjects. I provide back-up for our customer services enquiry team when they are asked for any official publications which they cannot find, and I provide basic training for them so that they can find reports, or know whom to contact if the item proves to be very hard to find.

My own role has also changed over the years, and I have moved from being an official publications librarian, to being the named contact on a fairly obscure web page. I promote official publications to law students, who are often required to read material from Parliament and government bodies, and I know that the history and politics librarians mention the printed and online sources, but a great more should be done, ideally, to promote this material and make it easier to find. I have been trying for a long time to make official publications more discoverable, but I have less time now than in the past to consider it at all, and my present role does not permit me to be familiar with the collection. As a consequence, although I knew that Parliament and the departments have put publications freely online for some time, and I was aware of some archiving issues, I confess I was not fully aware of the decline in printed publications. I rarely look at our holdings and I am not involved with the material unless colleagues or students ask for help.

The dedicated official publications team which existed when I arrived fourteen years ago was disbanded a few years later. Our acquisitions staff have dealt with accessioning the material for several years, and they have recently handed over all the shelving to the regular shelving team. I work with these staff to try to help them work out the order and what to do with anything unfamiliar, but my impression is that a dedicated team would find it easier to become familiar with official publications, though the present staff do the very best job that they can. The stock is considered to be of low priority – in real terms, this translates into “no priority”, so it can be hard to maintain momentum with routine processing and cataloguing if other more urgent tasks have to be done. The library has changed so we have to move on.

CHANGES TO PARLIAMENTARY PUBLISHING

The changes to parliamentary publishing in April 2016 came as real shock to me, which shows to what extent I have been divorced from official publications – and I fear I am a dinosaur, as I should have seen it coming. There is no doubt that most of our readers now expect to find material online, either through Google or by visiting official websites, though they often say they prefer to read longer publications in print. At Warwick we have access to Public Information Online, which is currently free because we buy so much printed material from Dandy. (Dandy continues to provide us with print on demand.) We also subscribe to Parliamentary Papers Online from Proquest. For some years I have not mentioned official publications to our managers, probably because I have an old-fashioned attachment to the material and I feared that we might lose PIO as well as the printed sources if it was thought that everything is freely available online. I realise that I should have suggested reviewing our official publications holdings several years ago.

OP: PRINT VERSUS ONLINE

It has been very interesting to read the excellent arguments put forward by SCOOP and others for retaining print and making all material discoverable, and I agree that it can be very difficult to track down a particular report online if you do not know its title exactly, or the link is broken. In addition, official websites do not seem to have good search engines and do not always support academic work well. However, I am slowly becoming a pragmatist in the argument over print versus online sources, because Warwick does not have a national collection of official publications; our role is to support the needs of teaching and research at Warwick. Our collection was never complete and researchers do not travel across Europe to visit it, so our situation is very different from the deposit libraries and others which are known to have good collections. I would hope that we may keep most of what we have collected, but we currently provide good online databases, and I have come around to the view that we now need either to stop taking print altogether or to reduce greatly the amount of material which we receive.

What finally led me to suggest a change was our lack of staff time – it became increasingly clear that eventually someone would say we could not cope, and I have had to to give time which I cannot easily afford to guide other staff and suggest what to relegate when we run out of space, which happens most summers. It is not an ideal situation. Most staff consider that the floor where we shelve official publications, the EDC and law reports, all with esoteric in-house classifications unlike anything else, is a strange land where dragons dwell. Weekend supervisors at the help desk report spending up to an hour to find a specific report and I take off my hat to them! However I would like to make the service better for our readers and to make life more bearable for all my colleagues.

Having discovered that many other libraries have stopped taking printed official publications some time ago, or are just about to do so, I began to discuss the issue with the managers of the various library teams who deal with the material. The dramatic developments in parliamentary publishing merely highlighted the fact that we should take action. We have met representatives of two database providers and at the time of writing, we hope to trial Official Publications Online, to compare it with Public Information Online. At the same time, we are contacting academic departments to ask whether anyone can give us a good reason to continue to subscribe to printed official publications. I also would like to promote the value of our two current databases, which some academics may not have noticed before. In the end, some good may come out of all this, if we draw the attention of our readers to these sources and raise awareness of official publications generally. Perhaps that is optimistic – only three academics have so far replied to my initial message. To be fair, we had to contact them very near to exam time, when they are at their most elusive, because we had temporarily lost access to PIO earlier in the year. There is no point recommending an online alternative if readers cannot log on to see it! We therefore intend to take our time and consult again.

One of my concerns is that heads of departments may not realise the significance of official publications, so I really want to contact all academic staff. Judging by the readers whom we met when we ran a specialised enquiry service, official publications may interest engineers, medics, and other scientists as well as the more usual suspects such as law and history students and researchers. Another concern has been that our managers might think we could just rely on free online sources, so I attended a recent management meeting with some trepidation, and made my best arguments for providing good databases to assist discoverability! The initial reaction was quite encouraging, perhaps because I prefaced my remarks by offering to save them space, staff time and money. If we can really do that and also improve discoverability for our students and academic staff, I would be happy.

PROCESS OF REVIEW

The process of the review is not over yet, but I have proposed that we stop taking material such as annual reports and accounts, which virtually no one here ever reads, and parliamentary committee reports and proceedings, which are now easy to browse on the Parliament website and easy to find individually in PIO or Proquest's Parliamentary Papers Online. I have asked if we might retain Hansard, Public General Acts and Measures and all command papers in print, and also whether we could make command papers loanable to encourage better use. If I could have project support, I would like to weed the official publications carefully, as well as finding ways to make the arrangement easier to browse. Whether this will happen, I do not yet know. At least I hope I have staved off the possibility of a general cull of official publications and suggested a better middle way! There will inevitably be several more meetings before we reach the end. I would rather not think about our EDC, which also needs a careful pruning and is very hard to navigate; one project at a time is enough, I think.

PRINT STILL MATTERS

I should say that I do believe that print still matters. The privatisation of official publishing and the move to online provision must surely lead to more grey literature than ever before – virtual grey literature, at that! Many of us must have occasionally spent hours following up leads to an obscure publication, only to find that all we can find is the associated press release, or the sad message “Oops! Page not found”. Last year I went on a wild goose chase for a consultation paper included in an indicative reading list for first year Law students, and I spent ages calming down the students, trying in vain to get a response from the teacher, and looking everywhere for the report. To his great credit, someone in the Home Office finally sent me a link to the report and arranged for The National Archives to provide that link in future. It was too late for the students, however, as their essay deadline had passed by then but I was still grateful that a busy press officer would help at all.

Official publications were never easy to find, and although databases can be excellent if you can afford the subscription, official publications seem likely to remain harder to find or to promote than most other Library material. Commercial databases are only available to members of the university which subscribes to them, so other researchers and interested members of the public will not benefit from them, but that is part of a general issue which has led to university libraries effectively closing much of their library collections to visitors. Unfortunately we have no choice about this, it is simply how database providers operate. Hannah Chandler has explained the roles of the UK Web Archive hosted by the British Library, the UK Government Web Archive hosted by The National Archives, and the Legal Deposit Web Archive, in her recent article. (See footnote 2). I hope that these developments will help researchers now and in the future, although I confess I still find the situation confusing. We need the deposit libraries and bodies such as SCOOP more than ever!

FINAL THOUGHTS

So I am left feeling nostalgic for the past, when libraries could allow members of the public to come in and read all of our holdings, and if you could use the old HMSO annual indexes, you could find an official publication, rather like producing a rabbit from a hat! However, our readers operate in different ways in the 21^st century, compared with how things were when I first started work, and online access has made research easier in many ways. I am therefore belatedly moving with the times, and as a result of the review at Warwick, I have become more enthusiastic about reaching out to all students and staff to promote this material better. I hope that good national collaboration will enable all of us to support our taught students and researchers, and each other.