2018 JSTOR

I’ve been asked to say a few words to round off the evening and ideally make you think it’s time to go home.

The theme I have chosen is Carpe Diem – seize the day.

Many years ago I went to a fundraising dinner in honour of Danny McGrain the Glasgow Celtic footballer. He had built a brilliant career and Pele had called him the best left back in the world.

And then he broke his leg and instead of being a rich international footballer he became a financially challenged youth team coach. At the fundraising dinner, a comedian some of you will have heard of called Frankie Boyle gave a speech and urged everyone to seize the day because you never know what will happen or when your world might be turned upside down by a broken leg. Seize the Day he said, Carpe Diem. Always remember, always remember that there were people on the Titanic who refused the sweet trolley.

So on that theme can I begin by thanking the Master of Pembroke College for arranging such a lovely dinner. She will have noticed that nobody refused the sweet trolley here! Lynne, it was lovely, thank you.

Now I mentioned the Titanic, so let me turn to the event we are here to celebrate. The twentieth anniversary of collaboration between JISC and JSTOR.

In March 1998, librarians, scholars, publishers and official representatives of the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom gathered at the American Embassy in London to celebrate the launch of a joint initiative between JSTOR and the JISC. The first objective of the JISC/JSTOR collaboration was to establish a mirror site of the JSTOR database at the University of Manchester. And I’ll return to that location later.

It’s now difficult to remember what it was like twenty years ago. 1998 was such a different world.

- The UK was planning a third runway at Heathrow.

- The US President was embroiled in a sex scandal with a woman called Stormy Lewinski - or was it Monica Daniels.

- England reached the appropriately named knock-out stages of the world cup, playing in a hostile European country. That was France of course

- The Euro was invented and the UK was embroiled in arguments over Europe

- The Good Friday Agreement was signed, meaning that we would never have to talk about Northern Ireland again.

On the technological front there was the same rush of innovation of short lived products that gained world fame then disappeared.

- The iMAC was launched – it lasted four years before being replaced.

- Microsoft launched Windows 98 – who uses that now!!

- And of course Google was launched. Another ephemeral product or what.

The world of technology was neatly summed up by the author Neil Gaiman.

And that’s what JISC and JSTOR were aiming to do.

It’s nice to see so many familiar faces. This room is full of living proof that the bible if not wrong at least Psalm 90 has been badly translated since three score years and 10 is clearly not the allotted span round here.

Can I offer a particular welcome to US colleagues and friends.

To Joan Lippincott, who I think of as the Mother Theresa of digital collections.

And welcome to Cliff Lynch and Cecilia. Cliff’s wider influence is not always recognised. You may think this is fake news but he is a little known influence on that great supergroup the Travelling Wilburys which was formed in California in 1988 and had a second album released in 1990. Some lyrics on that album are attributed to Bob Dylan but there is research to suggest they are not typical of his writing.

One song creates the standards for archival preservation and they shout to me of Cliff talking to Bob Dylan in a bar in Berkeley.

Some places they get mildew

And others get too hot

Some places are so damp that

Everything you got just rots

All kinds of condensation

Directories of the rain

There's not much compensation

When everything's been stained

Some have sentimental value that

Cannot be erased

Go store it in a cool dry place

And welcome to Kevin Guthrie. It is not widely known that by moving to JSTOR he aborted one of the great cultural proposals of the nineties. Several of us who zoomed round the world at that time putting things to rights planned to set up a journal called the Journal of Airport Librarianship to be written and read in the departure lounges we then called home and paid for in air miles. Kevin was to be the first editor but sadly preferred the comfort of life at home and the airport journal never got off the ground.

And can I welcome David Maguire, the current chair of JISC and try to make a serious point.

One of the things of which I am proudest was the creation of the six principles of data provision adopted by JISC. These are now completely taken for granted but when we created them were hugely contentious.

Firstly, Data must be free at the point of use.

This was certainly not a given. Charged mediated searching had until then been the norm. The determination to spread electronic methods of working which permeated all JISC programmes would be held back by charging, but encouraged by free access. JSTOR was to have a mirror site at Manchester. Manchester was the home of COPAC the collective catalogue of UK research libraries. We set COPAC up quite specifically with CURL, the predecessor of RLUK because the British Library was digitising its catalogue and had a stated aim to charge users for searches. We set up COPAC quite specifically to undercut and kill that idea and we did.

Secondly the model was to be Subscription- not transaction-based.

This model had been developed by The Combined Higher Education Software Team (CHEST) for the purchase of software licences for UK universities. At that point publishers were pressing the transaction-based model. Fortunately, the size of the budget gave JISC sufficient clout to set its own terms, while the experience of CHEST in negotiation ensured success. It was the so-called doughnut strategy. We went to publishers with serious money telling them they could be the jam in the doughnut or the hole.

Thirdly, Universality.

The intention was to use the budget to cover all disciplines. This again was a hard fought debate. The pressure was to spend the budget entirely on big science research publications as these were the most expensive and therefore most at risk of being cancelled in institutions. However, there was a clear wish to spread computer skills and practice throughout the HE community. It was felt that this would be greatly helped if every member of staff and every student had access to at least one resource that was essential to them.

Fourthly, Lowest common denominator.

In the same way it was clear that there should be something for staff and students at all levels. In the post-1992 world with double the number of universities there was no political will to set up an elite system of resources rather than a mass system. We should be as relevant to undergraduates as Nobel prizewinners

Fifthly, Commonality of interfaces.

This turned out to be a clear area of failure, although resolved in the end by Google

Finally, Common mass instruction programmes. There was a need to train everyone to operate independently. One area of failure in training was trust metrics as they were called – but hey who needs that unless there was to be fake news.

It took me quite a while to track down the six principles last week. In part – and this is an old beef – because there is no published history of JISC. When its predecessor the Computer Board was closed after twenty odd years, a history was commissioned and published. Now given that Malcolm Read was in charge for most of its history it might prove a slim volume, but the story is worth telling and risibly cannot really be found online. So perhaps the current chair of JISC might consider whether its story is worth preserving.

Malcolm always claimed that the growth of JISC was a response to the Follett Report. Well it has been claimed that the E-libraries bit was written by Lynne, Dave Cook, Alice Colban and I before Sir Brian was appointed. And it is all too often forgotten that the Follett Report led to a massive and hugely important library building programme. That seminal report had many facets.

And it is also nice to see Sir Brian Fender and Bahram Bakhradnia. I was never sure whether they had the wisdom to give us space to innovate, the innocence not to understand what we were doing or a sheer indifference to such small fry – or all three.

So to those who were not there. We set out, consciously, albeit replete with alcohol, to change the world and we did. We seized the day.

In a world of fake news, of politicians who reject experts in favour of prejudice, of governments who know no history, far less learn from it, it’s more important than ever that you seize the day, that you have a vision and that you value and use the powerful bodies we have – ARL, CNI, JISC, RLUK which are forces for change.

So to the youthful faces still here, continue to make HE the creator of change and not just the recipient of change. The University of Oxford has existed for almost a thousand years, much longer than the artificial construct of the nation state. From Boethius to Stephen Hawking, from James Watt to Marie Curie, world changing research has relied on university libraries and librarians.

So seize the day

Or to put it in the words of my great namesake Derek Del Boy Trotter

The world is your lobster - crack on!!