Mel Collier Oration (2006)

Vice-Chancellor,

I have the honour to present Professor Melvyn Collier. Mel Collier is a Strathclyde alumnus and perhaps the most distinguished graduate of our Department of Information Studies.

Mel was born in Bolton, Lancashire in 1947, second son of James Collier, a sub-postmaster and Jessie Siddall. His mother was keen on amateur dramatics and was wardrobe mistress for the school plays. She was proud to have made costumes for Sir Ian McKellen and may have contributed to Mel’s renowned theatrical ability in committees. He attended Bolton School, where he showed an early flair for languages and went on from there to become a student at the University of St Andrews, where he read French and Arabic, including a period spent in the Sudan. This gave him a taste for travel, which subsequently has led him all over the world and made him a leading contributor to the mythical Journal of Airport Librarianship.

Oriental languages gave him an opening for his first library job at St Andrews where he worked as a senior library assistant with the oriental collections. After experience there, he took the Postgraduate Diploma at Strathclyde, then went to University College Cardiff for his first post. He was fortunate there to be in at the beginning of library computer systems – it installed the first UK online library system - and to have the first taste of what was to become his consuming professional interest. He then held posts at the Polytechnic of Central London and at Hatfield Polytechnic, where he developed his seminal work on electronic information systems and digital libraries and where he introduced the first Local Area Network in a library and the first microcomputer network in a library.

From there he moved on to Leicester Polytechnic (later De Montfort University), first as Chief Librarian but latterly as Head of the Division of the Learning Development and where his responsibilities steadily increased while the University grew from 6000 to 29000 students. Here he further developed the concept of practitioner research, but rather than simply studying what went on, he developed a unique approach of conducting basic research on his own institution. That work also involved building IT services and a network across nine campuses. At De Montfort perhaps his most notable work was on ELINOR, the first UK digital library project and ELISE,- one of the first six EC library projects (3rd Framework), which concerned online access to images. He also instituted the Elvira series of conferences which attracted the biggest names from the UK and overseas from a wide and eclectic community of computer and information sciences. It is perhaps then unsurprising that, still in his forties and still before the World Wide Web was invented he was awarded a chair. One might also mention that he was part of the literally handful of pioneers of information strategies from their first inception in 1991.

Aged fifty he was headhunted by the commercial world and decided to do something new (instead of getting the sports car - that came later). At Dawson’s Information Services Group he became Director for Strategic and Operational Development as that company sought to move from being a traditional library book and journal supplier to an electronically based company. When the company was taken over by a major American competitor in 2000, he branched out as a consultant with a fearsome list of clients from national and university libraries to IT giants such as Logica. He has also conducted institutional reviews from Australia to Switzerland.

In 2001 he moved to Tilburg University. He faced there the difficult task of following in the footsteps of the renowned and popular Hans Geleijnse, who had been one of the key European leaders in the development of digital library theory. Mel’s determination is perhaps best demonstrated through his fluency in languages. Although appointed as an English speaker, Mel knew that to get the most from and give the most to his new post with an exclusively Dutch staff, he would have to communicate effectively. So he set himself to learn Dutch. It is a notoriously difficult language, but he was fluent within a few months. He had not been there very long before his wife Anne was diagnosed with the illness from which she eventually died in 2004. He immediately returned to England. Things seemed to go well and after a period he was able to take up a part-time appointment as acting Librarian at the University of Leuven.

Perhaps the only sadness of this ceremony is that Anne died after a brave battle against illness and that his wife of thirty six years cannot be here today. She would have been very proud. However Mel is a devoted family man, and despite his youthful looks is a grandfather. It is then a great pleasure to welcome his family and friends here today, especially his daughter Charlotte and her husband Neil.

In 2005 he was appointed librarian at Leuven University. One of the great European universities which, through his experience, is being transformed from mediaeval slumber to the digital frontier. He combines this with a chair in Digital Resource Management at Northumbria University. His family wish it to be known however that while he may be a professor in Information Sciences, with notably achievements in IT, he can’t work the video. Luckily the video has now broken, so ending his humiliation.

His professional contribution is huge and this is reflected in a substantial set of publications, some of them describing his implementation of technical innovation. As early as 1984 he developed the first multi-site library network; in the mid-1990’s he pioneered electronic licenses and model contracts with publishers. Soon after that he was working on the general theory of the digital library, developing what is widely accepted as the standard definition of such organisations. More recently he has been working on economic and business models for digital libraries. His latest projects have been a study on the development of a business plan for the creation of a pan-European library based on eight national libraries, and most recently a business case for the Bodleian Library to develop it as an electronic library.

Perhaps unsurprisingly he has been active in professional and national bodies throughout his career. He spent many years in various leadership roles in ASLIB (The Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux), was a leading member of the Library and Information Commission, which introduced the People’s Network into public libraries across the UK, and has served on a variety of committees of the Joint Information Systems Committee, which manages and organises the networks we take entirely for granted. Although based abroad he is now actively involved in moves to try to revive practitioner research in the UK.

His other interests tend to the sedentary, by which I mean golf and gentle hillwalking, although he used to be very active in the Scouts. One of my earliest memories of Mel is when he was a student at Saint Andrews living in Crail and he had a summer job sweeping the streets there. The streets were not in a bad state really and the work was not over-taxing. One day he was formally reported for resting and “leaning on his broom”. Clearly the act of a cerebral man - unlike the time, also in Crail, when he was in trouble from the owner of the flat downstairs, because his home-brewed beer overflowed and leaked through the ceiling into the flat below. That tale reflects the seemingly endless hospitality and good company of the Collier household.

But above all his has been a career of proselytising, leading by example through innovation in the organisations for which he was responsible. He is a perfect example of the Strathclyde alumnus, taking useful learning and applying it not just to his own professional practice but to changing and developing the practice of his profession.

Mel is driven by the ambition to make things better through the use of technology. But with all that he is a rounded man, a devoted grandparent, a generous host, a Scot by choice rather than birth, a generous contributor to his profession, a loud and public advocate of change, an entrepreneur with commercial instincts and an innovator of distinction.

For all of these reasons, Vice-Chancellor and with the authority of Senate I ask you to confer on Melvyn Collier the degree of Doctor of Letters honoris causa.