Hey you! Digital leaders; it’s time to take a fresh look at libraries 

Next week, I am hosting three seminars in London, Glasgow and Cardiff – the Library Global Excellence Tour – on the subject of regional and national digital library transformation.

The potential for libraries to deliver on today’s priorities, on citizens’ and students’ digital skills, is vastly underestimated. There is an untapped opportunity to reinvent what we currently do.

There is a need for standardisation and rationalisation of national and local digital library service delivery. This aim of the tour is to identify common processes, industry best practice, open standards and common components.

Who is transforming digitally on a regional and national scale?

We will hear how:

• The library sector can stay relevant by responding more effectively to the changes caused by digital technologies.
• How others are working together to make our rich cultural heritage and collections accessible on regional and national levels.
• Who’s ahead of the game across the world.
• Who’s making it happen.
  
  The Library Global Excellence Tour

To this end we have brought global speakers from Australia and the US to tell us how they are “making it happen” how they are delivering, redefining themselves, their services, business models, and missions. These are powerful speakers, some of whom are working with the Library of Congress and all are amazing professionals I have met on my travels.

Our Australian colleagues have delivered an agile and efficient single LMS across the state and also a “One Card” platform. This has transformed the library user experience, while still retaining local autonomy and identity for each local library service.

They have also negotiated state wide e-content deals driving a high-quality user experience and access in tandem with ensuring efficiencies and significant discounting in the purchase of content. This experience has also spun out into a successful commercial co-development of a new purchasing platform for all Libraries.

We will hear about a new and engaging Digital Library Discovery platform to help libraries compete with Amazon. A report titled ALICE….’Through the Looking Glass’ was produced and this has now evolved into Project LUCI, an innovative development collaboration between three Australian States (Queensland, Victoria & South Australia). See the unique vision for LUCI and hear how this fits into Queensland’s vision for the Public Library in 2020 in the virtual realm.

This is a one-off opportunity to hear from some of the award winning, global movers and shakers in our industry! The speakers are all high-profile state/ national/ academic librarians from Europe, Australia, the US and of course the UK and Ireland who have already delivered much of what the UK library sector wishes to do/ needs to do in digital library experiences.

Drop me a line for more info (liz@sol.us), check out our speakers and register to join us in in London, Glasgow or Cardiff!

Liz McGettigan is president of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals Scotland and digital director at SOLUS.