Bournemouth: rather lovely.

Last week, the annual UKSG Conference was held in Bournemouth, England.  The conference programme includes a mixture of plenary, lightning talks, and breakout sessions.

Together with Fred Guy, project manager of the Keepers Registry, I jointly presented a breakout session entitled E-journals and long-term availability: an overview and panel discussion on the archiving infrastructure to meet the needs of users.  Over the two sessions this event attracted well over 60 delegates.

The session was separated into two components.  To begin, brief presentations described the role of the Keepers Registry (view slides) and the UK LOCKSS Alliance (view slides) in helping libraries move towards e-only environments.

Following this, a panel session was held to offer insights into the activity taken by libraries to treat electronic collections as sustainable, move towards e-only environments, and responsibly discard unrequired print collections.  The panel comprised David Prosser (Research Libraries UK – RLUK), Lorraine Estelle (Jisc), Joanne Farrant (Cambridge University), and Bill Barker (London School of Economics).

An engaging panel session

A great write-up of the breakout session highlights key issues discussed by the engaging panel, noting in particular: “unanimous agreement that e-journal preservation services have given libraries the confidence to firstly cancel print subscriptions and secondly to dispose of back-runs.�