Development of a Business Plan for an International Co-Operative Digital Library the European

Development of a business plan for an international co-operative digital library – The European Library (TEL)

The Authors

Mel Collier, Professor, Information Management Research Institute, School of Informatics, University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, and Consultant to the TEL project. E-mail:

Acknowledgements

Received: 8 April 2004 Revised: 9 June 2004 Accepted: 3 July 2004 All URLs were checked 30 June 2004

Abstract

The European Library (TEL) project aims to give digital access to the combined resources of the national libraries of Europe, operating under the auspices of the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL). A preparatory project, part funded by the European Union, ran from January 2001 until January 2004. Because of the diverse nature and missions of the participating libraries, developing a coherent business plan was a significant challenge. It appears that business planning for digital libraries, with some exceptions, is not hitherto well documented. This paper describes the research process carried out, the harmonisation of business objectives leading to the final business plan and some observations on the process.

Article Type:

Literature review

Keyword(s):

Europe; National libraries; Business planning; Digital libraries; International cooperation.

Journal:

Program: electronic library and information systems

Volume:

38

Number:

4

Year:

2004

pp:

225-231

Copyright ©

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

ISSN:

0033-0337

1. Introduction

The European Library (TEL – has its origins in 1999 and early 2000 when several European national library directors conceived the idea of an integrated gateway to the digital services of European national libraries. An initial project concept was developed on behalf of the national libraries of Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands. On the basis of this it was decided to apply for funding under Key Action 3 of the European Union's (EU) Information Societies Technology (IST) research programme. The eventual partners in the bid were the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), the national libraries of Finland, Germany, Italy (Florence), The Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland and the UK, together with the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico (ICCU), the national cataloguing agency in Italy. Evaluation by the IST programme officials advised that the proposal was not suitable for a technology-based research project but was appropriate for an accompanying measure within the programme. Total funding for the project was 1.8 million Euro, of which 66 per cent (1.2 million Euro) was provided as subsidy by the European Commission (EC). The rest was provided by the partners. Issues that were identified as important to be resolved during the accompanying measure included:

• exploration of necessary agreements with publishers;
• developing consensus among the national libraries about the requirements and objectives of the service;
• developing an appropriate metadata environment; and
• testing technical solutions which would combine access via existing Z39.50 targets and an XML-based central index.

The accompanying measure started in January 2001 and was completed in January 2004. The overall outcome of the project is that it will be taken forward as an operational service under the auspices of CENL and hosted by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, The Netherlands. Woldering (2004) provides a general account of the project including the technical and metadata aspects and Van Veen and Oldroyd (2004) provide an account of the novel approach to search and retrieve in TEL.

It was recognised from the start that the establishment of consensus on the requirements and business objectives for an eventual service was a major challenge. Complicating factors included the diverse business aims and missions of the participating libraries, long standing difficulties associated with copyright, authentication and e-commerce, multilinguality and the rapid speed of technical change in the field. It was clear that to develop a coherent business plan for the proposed service would require detailed analysis of business requirements, harmonisation of conflicting aims and objectives and a resultant shared vision. The contract with the EC for TEL therefore included a specific workpackage on business planning. The other workpackages were:

• publisher relations;
• metadata development;
• test-bed development; and
• project management and dissemination.

The University of Northumbria (which had been commissioned to co-ordinate the original bid to the EC) was engaged to advise on the business planning workpackage as a sub-contractor to the British Library. This paper describes the methodology and processes used in order to reach a consensus among the project partners on which to build the resultant business plan.

2. The problem

Preliminary work indicated that in 2000 it was very difficult to find published or public material on the business planning behind digital libraries. Published research work hitherto had focused almost entirely on technical, design, copyright and, more recently, human and societal aspects. In comparison to the vast literature on these subjects, accounts of the business case behind digital libraries seemed to be rare or incidental to other issues. On the one hand this is understandable where there is a commercial or competitive motivation behind the digital library. In such cases, if there is a well developed business plan, one would expect it to be confidential. On the other hand there are many digital library projects which are publicly funded, and one might expect the rationale and process behind the business plan, if not the detailed business plan itself, to be available. One might also expect the professional literature to cover the principles and process of business plan development for digital libraries, if not the content of specific examples. However, it seemed that if TEL were to develop an effective business plan, it would have to do so without the benefit of much prior published experience. Although a few examples of documentation of business planning have now appeared, the literature is still small, particularly in the context of international collaboration.

The need to focus on the business issues of digital library collaboration was recognised at the outset by the TEL partners. When the evaluators of the bid invited the proposers to think of the project as an accompanying measure, issues such as business planning, along with publisher relations, metadata development and consensus building assumed even greater prominence. If the literature was anything to go by, many digital library projects are started without much attention to the business issues. The TEL partners realised that although they were enthusiastic about digital library development and committed in principle to co-operation, a concept such as a European digital library would need to be properly justified. Although some of the partners had highly developed policies and strategies for digital library development, an international co-operative approach was very much a new challenge.

There were also some special factors of interest to consider. The original concept envisaged document delivery and e-commerce as part of the activity. This raised the question of how the partner libraries would co-operate as well as compete. National libraries can have widely differing business aims, which raised the question of how those aims could be reconciled. It needed to be decided who the intended clients of the service would be, how the potential market would be assessed and reached, and what services and products would be on offer. Account needed to be taken of the special role of national libraries in their respective countries and, in a context unique to this project, their co-operative role in European science, culture and heritage. Along with these big issues were the usual basic questions of how the service would be financed, set up, governed and evaluated. All of these issues and questions formed the problem to be addressed in the business planning workpackage.

3. The method

The first activity was to test the preliminary indication that published experience was scarce. This was done through a conventional literature and Internet search carried out at the University of Northumbria, looking for references to the business and economic aspects of digital libraries. A separate review looked at the Web sites of commercial offerings such as netLibrary, Northern Light, Ebrary and Unext, which could have relevance to TEL. A third review mapped the digital activities of the TEL partners themselves. All of this was brought together in a state-of-the-art review as the first deliverable of the workpackage.

The second activity was market research. Due to the particular challenge of this project (see below) this was split into two parts: a preliminary study carried out by an external contractor, and near the end of the project an electronic survey targeting users of the CENL Web site Gabriel ( together with consultation with user groups.

The third activity looked in greater depth at the digital products, services and clients of the partner libraries, using a series of categorised charts that they were asked to fill in. This was followed by a structured interview (or due to pressure of time an electronic survey asking the same questions) asking the partner libraries what the business aims behind their present digital services were, and what their business aims and requirements would be from TEL. The results of these studies were then tabulated, and conflicts and congruences were identified. From these analyses it was possible to propose a harmonised approach to the business issues and a draft mission statement for the eventual TEL service. This was all brought together in a deliverable entitled: “Harmonisation plan and service scenarios”.

The fourth activity took this newly harmonised set of business objectives, scenarios and services and combined them with practical matters such as finance, governance and management, technical framework and an implementation plan, to form the draft business plan in mid-2003. Inputs also came from the other workpackages. The draft business plan was discussed at several meetings of the steering committee, leading to finalisation of the plan in January 2004.

The organisation of the project followed a normal model for EU-funded projects. There was a steering committee composed of directors of all the participating institutions, with a management group composed of representatives of a sub-set of the partners. Each workpackage had a team of representatives in which all the partners participated, although the workload varied between partners according to the specialist expertise available. Regular contact was maintained with project officers in the EC and there were peer reviews at key points in the project. The normal method of working for the business plan workpackage was for the consultant to write a discussion paper for debate and decision in the workpackage team that met regularly in each of the partner locations. Decisions in the workpackage group then led to further activity (e.g. a consultation exercise or survey) outside the meeting. A number of papers were written and investigations carried out by staff from the participating libraries for discussion and agreement at the following meeting. Although much communication and discussion took place through virtual meetings, it was formally necessary for decisions to be made in face-to-face meetings. Major questions of policy were referred via the project management group to the project steering committee.

4. Summary of the results

4.1 State-of-the-art

The literature search confirmed the preliminary indication that there was relatively little published material specifically on business planning for digital libraries in 2001. This observation was pithily summarised by Lesk (1997): “economics is definitely not a solved problem”. A limited number of works were identified as useful in the ground clearing work for the TEL research (Greenstein, 2000a; EU-NSF Working Group on Intellectual Property and Economic Issues, 1998; Weber et al., 1998; Arnold, 2000). Perhaps the most relevant description of the planning process was given by Greenstein (2000b) whilst Halliday and Oppenheim (1999) provided useful modelling work primarily focusing on electronic journals. A repeat of the search in 2002 produced additional related material (Montgomery, 2000; Lynch, 2002; Snowhill, 2001, Digital Library Federation, 2001; Tanner and Deegan, 2002). Zhou (2000) gave an interesting account of an approach to international collaboration. However it appeared that the sort of process that was envisaged for business planning in TEL was hitherto not widely reported in the published literature. At the time of writing this article (May 2004) some additional directly relevant material has appeared. Barton and Walker (2003) have described the business plan for DSpace, while Bishoff and Allen (2004) have provided a framework and resource guide for digital asset management for cultural heritage organisations.

The study of commercial offerings produced a select list of companies describing for each:

• the product(s);
• business terms;
• method of payment;
• pricing; and
• what they were saying to investors.

This information was collected because it was originally thought that the TEL service would include an overtly commercial element, but it soon became clear that this would not be the case and was not taken further. There were two main reasons: most of the partner libraries do not have an important income generation mission and any paid-for services are handled by the partner libraries themselves on an individual basis.

The study of partner offerings looked at what digital products were available from the partner libraries at that time (October 2001), analysed according to type of content, type of customer for whom it was intended, current state of development, whether it was a paid-for service and if so what method of payment was accepted. As might be expected, the amount of primary digital content (e.g. full text, images, video, sound) was generally still quite small, with relatively large amounts of metadata available (catalogues, indexes, etc.) There was a preponderance of services that were free of charge over paid-for services. Except for one product in one library, where credit card payment was in place, payment was by offline billing or subscription. This situation changed somewhat over the next 18 months when pay-per-view was more widely introduced.

Finally, the state-of-the-art review analysed a range of possibilities for the nature and governance of the future TEL service, and posed a number of key questions that would have to be answered, in the first place by the partner libraries themselves, and then by the consortium as a whole by mutual agreement.

4.2 Market research

Originally it had been planned to carry out market research in the early stages of the TEL project, but it was soon recognised that this presented a real difficulty – how to gauge potential user demand when the eventual products and services of TEL were still quite ill-defined, and quite fundamental principles about the nature of TEL were yet to be hammered out by the partners. It would have been futile to try to consult potential end users in this situation, even if an appropriate method could have been devised to reach them. It was therefore decided to split the work into two phases: an early, but limited, consultation with focus groups organised by partner libraries and carried out by an external consultant, then a further exercise later when the nature of the proposed service was more or less defined. This exercise comprised an electronic survey targeting the users of the CENL Gabriel Web site, and an evaluation of the prototype TEL portal carried out with focus groups by the University of Northumbria.

The first phase (mid-2001) was positive, with qualifications. A range of potential benefits, functions and categories of data were identified. Key suggestions included:

• digitised content (as distinct from licensed born-digital content) was likely to be important;
• TEL should concentrate on material which is not readily available elsewhere; and
• material should as far as possible be free at point of use.

It was thought that the TEL concept was unique. On the other hand it was recognised that the composition of the groups – professionals from the library world was a limiting factor and a possible source of bias.

The survey of Gabriel users (April-July 2003) was positive. Interesting findings included the result that 75 per cent of respondents use data from more than one national library when using Gabriel, and 95 per cent expressed a wish to search multiple collections. The evaluation work by Northumbria (September-November 2003) provided encouragement that the national libraries would find response from their intended audience: researchers and the “informed citizen”.

4.3 Harmonisation

The first part of this study analysed in greater depth the primary digital products, services and users of the participating national libraries and by mapping them in a series of matrices established a complete picture of activities across all the libraries, showing commonalities and individualities. Primary products were analysed according to:

• collection type (e.g. treasures, deposit);
• content type (e.g. scientific journals, portraits, maps); and
• theme (e.g. travel, legal history).

The analysis showed a fairly thin spread across 30 categories. A similar approach was applied to digital metadata products showing much greater conformity across 27 categories. Users were analysed according to type (e.g. academics/researchers, senior citizens) and broad discipline (e.g. humanities, law). This showed a fairly coherent user base across the libraries. Another analysis identified what new categories of user (if any) would be targeted by each library in the TEL service.