We spoke with Dave Puplett, Head of Library Services at the University of Greenwich, whose remit has extended to cover the University’s Academic Teaching Enhancement team.

“My job is substantially the same,” Dave says, “but the identity of Library Services and its remit have broadened.  Combining the roles strengthens us as a group and stretches the definition of Library Services – I would now describe what we do as Library Services Plus.”

It was the Vice-Chancellor who asked him to accept the new role in addition to his existing duties. “The alignment works very well.  It was an opportunity to make Academic Enhancement, an established team that was essentially academic- and lecturer-facing; an opportunity to bring resources together so all faculty support was delivered by one larger group.” He is keen to emphasise that the existing enhancement team did a good job, but the way it was set up as an individual unit meant that it could not be quite as attuned to the student experience.  The Library, by contrast, has deep links with both faculty and students – “librarians are essentially about forging and maintaining relationships”.

The existing Teaching Enhancement and Library Services teams had already been working on some shared initiatives when Covid struck in spring 2020 and the University embarked on the first of a series of lockdowns. The Library responded quickly to the need to innovate by deploying technologies and changes to collections policies. The Library team is part of a wider directorate and works alongside a team that provides core IT support.  It is therefore well-placed to leverage “all the interesting things that are happening” in fulfilment of what is now the University’s increasingly digital strategy to deliver teaching and learning.

In the past year, all programmes and the resources that support them have converted to digital learning resources.  This has meant not only encouraging academics to stop relying on print, but also to teach them better ways of teaching in a digital environment. There were pockets of resistance: one course leader asked the Library to buy 20 print copies of a certain title.  “The idea of buying 20 copies of any book is almost unimaginable now,” says Dave, “but there are still academics who hope the changes to collections policies will all ‘blow over’ once the government restrictions have been relaxed. The message from the Library must be ‘no’: our students have moved on. We shall be seriously disappointing both new and returning students if we tell them the lion’s share of the materials they need for their courses are sitting on the physical shelves of the Library.”

New learning and teaching programmes must be based on the idea that students will engage in quite a lot of their learning remotely. If proof were needed that this is the right approach to take, a cursory examination of the Library’s print lending statistics provides it.  These have dropped dramatically year-on-year for the past five years, and over the past two years the decline has been ‘shocking’ – “there is no way it will bounce back again. Usage of the electronic collections continues to soar however, and a new balance is being found for the role of print in our collections.”

Dave says that he and his colleagues understand that academics have had an extremely difficult time over the past fifteen months. The Library has tried to be as flexible and responsive as possible in providing the kinds of support requested – by committing large sums to the supply of digital textbooks, for example – but in the long term such measures are not only unsustainable, but do not embrace the types of teaching and learning policies the University wishes to pursue. The high costs of one-textbook-per-student aggregator models are not hidden from academics, nor the consequences if they insist on the library paying for them – i.e., limitations in resources elsewhere. Open Source textbooks are listed in the Library’s catalogues if their quality can be verified. Publishers’ business models that allow access to certain books to specific cohorts only, rather than to all interested library patrons, are avoided.

 “The advantage of having a team dedicated to enhancing how academics deliver their teaching programmes is that we can appreciate the issues from a different angle. It’s no longer a question of transactionally asking ‘give us your reading lists’; more ‘what kinds of materials and resource will achieve the learning outcomes you are seeking to deliver?’ More people now understand the importance of getting learning resources right.  Librarians are well-suited to engage in this orbit of conversation.  Many themselves now have teaching qualifications and want to help academic colleagues to become better teachers.  And we’re all trying to get our heads round how technology can enhance learning.”

Asked if Greenwich has beta-tested any of the digital products currently being developed by publishers, he says, “Not yet beyond the e-textbook platforms and services we were already working with before the pandemic. But the team is hungry.  We would love to look at the Cambridge HE programme. We have a new Deputy Vice-Chancellor – appointed six months ago – who is developing a Student Success strategy. Personally, I am very ambitious to make all these initiatives work and see my teams play a leading role. I have been at Greenwich for six years and leading the Library for three.  I know we need to do things differently to get to where we want to be.”

Ultimately, Dave believes that the book and journal formats will become less recognisable entities. They are already being broken down into component parts and academics are seeing the value in being able to create a course with these building blocks.  In the future, learning resources will need to be “flexible, innovative and modular.  The old formats won’t make a lot of sense if they’re structured around a world that no longer exists.” An example that Dave sometimes uses to illustrate the passing of this ‘old world’ is that he regularly has to explain to students the genesis of the word ‘Save’ when they’re working on digital literacy. “Few of today’s students can remember the era of floppy disks, when the ‘Save’ icon literally represented inserting a disk in a drive to back up your work.”

Similarly, he says, it may soon not make sense to students to talk about a journal article; it will not make sense to them to be told that a critical bit of information they need came out of a book. “They don’t get it. They just want to click on that bit. Context is what they’re trying to understand – on their course, in their life, at that moment.”

Asked how he relaxes – when he has time to relax – Dave Puplett says that at the start of the first lockdown he installed his guitar hanger next to his desk. “In between calls or when I’m on calls and can’t get away from the screen but not directly involved in the conversation, I often make sure I’m muted and pick up my guitar. I’m also a Tottenham Hotspur fan. The last thing I did before lockdown was to go to see Spurs play, I can’t wait to go back.”