The Cambridge Australia and New Zealand Librarian Advisory Board [ANZLAB] was founded in 2017 and held its first (and only, to date) face-to-face meeting in 2018. Further meetings will be planned after all pandemic restrictions have been lifted. In the meantime, board members have kindly contributed to several virtual meetings.

Some of the ANZLAB members were already long-standing members of the Cambridge Global Librarian Advisory Board [GLAB]. Marilyn Fordyce, who retired from the post of Associate University Librarian at the University of Otago, was an outstanding member of GLAB for thirteen years. To celebrate Marilyn’s many contributions to the Cambridge boards, we asked to interview her shortly before her retirement.

Marilyn says she’s not sure she ever decided to be a librarian; it was serendipity. She moved to a new city and landed a job as a library assistant at the University of Canterbury. The library experience proved to be portable when she subsequently spent 3 years traveling in Australia and the USA. When she returned to New Zealand she qualified as a librarian and began work at the University of Otago, where she worked for the rest of her career, holding several successive roles there.

Marilyn’s career achievements include pioneering the delivery of resources to the University’s new distance teaching program for Theology and Aviation Medicine as a young newly-qualified librarian, disciplines which had very different information needs but required similar innovative enabling mechanisms; building professional, focused, hard-working teams; developing a reputation for always keeping the library budget on target while meeting user needs; library liaison during the construction of the iconic Information Services building in which the Central Library is now located; centralising the activities of acquisitions and cataloguing departments from many branch libraries into a newly merged department; and generally being an early adopter of electronic products and solutions. Of the latter, she observes that “it was an easy move in a country where deliveries, largely by ship, took weeks”.

Looking back over her career, Marilyn has few regrets; but she says that in retrospect she would have liked to work at more institutions, even though Otago has given her some great opportunities.

Asked if librarians in New Zealand face particular challenges, she says: “New Zealand is a small country at the bottom of the world, surrounded by the sea. On the world scene we are insignificant. In some world maps we don’t even appear. We are sometimes mistaken for part of Australia. There are only eight universities in New Zealand. We find that membership of consortia both locally and internationally is strategically crucial when negotiating with publishers. On the plus side, because of our remoteness and size, publishers often find our libraries congenial testing grounds when they want to trial new pricing models and products.

“We are located at the confluence of two of the world’s major tectonic plates and we have experienced major earthquakes as the plates move against each other. That this affects our budgets may come as a surprise: it is because seismic activity is much more likely to damage older buildings and therefore we have to spend substantial amounts of money on making them safe. Following some devastating earthquakes over the last few decades, the government mandated the seismic strengthening of all buildings. Many of our buildings have therefore required expensive upgrades. This has affected budgets across the campus, including the Library’s.

“New Zealand universities are government funded. Domestic student enrolments are important and contribute to our share of these funds, which are allocated on a per capita basis. However, to increase our income we also recruit international students, who pay significantly higher fees. COVID has limited travel to New Zealand and reduced this important contribution to the university’s income, with significant knock-on effects on all budgets, including the Library’s. Most of the information resources we buy are billed in foreign currencies, so we are affected by varying exchange rates, which can be quite marked. Hedging of rates is important to provide a level of certainty for planning.

“Participating in overseas conferences is expensive and time-consuming when you’re based in New Zealand. Therefore opportunities to join workshops and engage in face-to-face sharing of ideas with publishers and colleagues from academic libraries in other countries are limited. The Cambridge advisory boards have been invaluable in this respect.

“On the positive side, because it took so long for print resources to reach us, we embraced electronic resources with enthusiasm as soon as they became available. We still lead the world in our acquisition and imaginative deployment of online materials and solutions.”

Asked how she sees the future of academic libraries, Marilyn says that she believes a fully Open Access scholarly environment will change fundamentally the Library’s approach to how it supports patrons, adding “we are still in a period of transition and look forward with excitement to the next stage”.

Along with the move to OA, COVID has been another game-changer. It has forced librarians to identify which of the services they offer are essential and then how to deliver them when most staff are required to work from home. Marilyn believes the way libraries are run in the future will be permanently influenced by these experiences. Workforce needs have also changed dramatically. Training for librarianship now needs to be broader, to include new and sophisticated technical skills; legal and contractual knowledge; how to support research; how to manage data and analytics and other kinds of specialist support; and how to develop better interpersonal skills. New Zealand’s academic librarian workforce is at present ageing; young librarians need to be recruited and trained to deliver these things.

Marilyn is a little frustrated that librarians’ superb response to COVID resulted in mixed perceptions of their skills and role in the provision of teaching and learning support. “Staff and students certainly realised how important online resources are; but since we provided easy (for them) access to these resources, many assumed they were just free and not sourced and delivered by the Library. Because we instituted self-service facilities for print and were able to offer only limited face-to-face interaction with librarians, our contribution was no longer as obvious to our patrons as it had been pre-COVID. Librarians must now counter this by developing strong networking and communication skills. They must take every opportunity to demonstrate how they contribute to research, learning and teaching.”

One of the unexpected outcomes of COVID is the high value that users now place on campus space. This is one of any university’s most expensive commodities and library buildings, because they are usually centrally located, are often sought after for non-study-related activities. Marilyn says librarians should lobby strongly to reserve library space for study purposes. She thinks that initiatives across the world to digitise special and heritage collections will increase; and welcomes this opportunity to make unique collections more widely available. And to combat budgetary constraints, she believes that libraries at different institutions will increasingly pool resources to fulfil all their users’ needs.

The Cambridge team and her fellow advisory board members would like to thank Marilyn for her stellar contributions to board activities over the years and wish her a long, happy and enriching retirement.