Challenges with building and procuring collections in a changing landscape

In this poster I wish to address the challenges for the procurement and upholding of a trustworthy, and relevant collection of scholarly information resources. The landscape of publication practices has changed, since the open access 2002 initiative. My perspective on the issue is from my position as Head of Information Resources and Publication at Malmö University library. I wish to discuss how communication came to be key for building trust within the university management so as to be able to preserve the quality, relevance and flexibility of our scholarly information resources in other words to maintain trustworthy collections.

One purpose of the University Library is to have a sustainable and relevant portfolio of information resources for both our students and researchers. The Swedish government resolved that all research funded by the Swedish state ought to be openly accessible when published by 2026. Our national library runs the national consortia and they have entered into transformative agreements since 2016. In reality, this means that the overall costs for maintaining the University Libraries collections has altered, there is the added cost of the publication fee.

It became imperative to rearrange how we usually dealt with and, as importantly, communicated, the procurement of our scholarly resources. We needed to build a foundation for trust through transparent, evident and well-argued structures, principles and choices.

Dialog and transparency have been key and although there has been and remain challenges it has been extremely valuable to us as a group to work towards a common goal to establish trust and maintain our collection.