An interview with Mick Archer

Two years ago, AstraZeneca said goodbye to its traditional library system and opened a highly-efficient virtual library. The result is a streamlined resource that allows the company’s 60,000 employees around the world to get, use and share information anyway they need. Mick Archer, virtual library portfolio manager for AstraZeneca’s Global Information Science and Libraries division, recently talked with Copyright Clearance Center to tell us how it all came together.

Excerpts:

Q: Where does your library sit within AstraZeneca?
Archer: Within Global Information Science and Libraries, although that’s all changing, because we’re being merged with our Discovery IT department.

Q: How is your library system structured?
Archer: AstraZeneca has eight main research sites. Three in Sweden, two in the U.K., two in the U.S. and one in Canada, and each of those has a library. In the past those libraries were run reasonably autonomously. Two years ago, we started a project to become a totally global organization and to put all the budgets together for all deliverables. We divide our services into three portfolios. One is for the purchase and delivery of journals, documents, books, and monographs. The second, our Published Information service, delivers databases, news, and other content. And in our third portfolio, Information Science and Analysis, information scientists conduct searches and analyze information for the scientists on site. Those three portfolios fall under Global Information Science and Libraries.

Q: Describe AstraZeneca’s virtual library.
Archer: It is taking what you would have found in a traditional library five years ago and making it available electronically. In a library, you’d see a reference desk. In our virtual library, we are developing a virtual reference desk function. Instead of shelves to put books and journals on, we offer information access over the intranet. We deliver books, journals, and document supply electronically. We spend over 90% of our budget on electronic journals, and about eight or nine percent we spend on paper.

Q: Why the need for the virtual library?
Archer: We’re a global organization with eight major R&D sites and lots of marketing companies worldwide, and all want access to published information. Delivering eight separate journal subscriptions to eight separate libraries is very inefficient, when you can deliver one set of journals, one set of electronic books, and one document delivery service, all managed once. Under appropriate licenses, you can supply it to the whole company, 60,000 people. So definitely the push was efficiency and effectiveness, efficient use of budgets, and of our staff time. In the past we had nine people working on document delivery. Now we’ve got three people serving the whole of the company. It’s quite efficient.

Q: What is your goal for this system?
Archer: Our aim is to make delivery of full text transparent to the user. If somebody wants a dozen articles to support their research work, we want to say we’ll deliver those to your desktop. You should ask for those papers and get them delivered. We’ve got a system that does that. However, the copyright issues with different methods of delivery are different. So for an electronic journal, we can just give the link and you can access it as many times as possible. With secure electronic delivery from the British Library, you can only print it once, and you can only access it a few times for a limited period. You cannot share that document. You can’t send a link to somebody else and say “this is an interesting article, read it,” whereas you could if it was an electronic journal. We need to be able to tell employees what they can do with those documents and how they can get more rights. We need some easy way to actually give them a way of sharing those documents legally. That’s why Rightsphere is exactly what we need to go on top of this sort of delivery. We don’t need to worry about whether we’ve got permission in our subscriptions, or pay-per-view permission or document supply. They can have the same rights for all those documents.

Q: Is it challenging to get all the content you need from publishers in electronic form?
Archer: It is an issue. On the journal side, we’ve got licenses from about 60 publishers and that covers about 80-90% of our journals. To actually become totally electronic, there are hundreds of publishers that perhaps have one or two journals, and the effort to try and get all those journals on board is going to be disproportionate to the benefits. On the book side, electronic books are still not as advanced as electronic journals, so there’s still a lot of work to do there to find out exactly how we’re going to deliver these.

Q: What has your new system done for your end-users?
A: Most library and other information services are end-user self-service now. It means people can get access to material instantly, and that means an improvement in research productivity. Our service can deliver any document people require to their desktop instantly through an electronic journal. We use British Library mostly for document supply and they send their secure electronic delivery documents directly to people’s desktops in less than 24 hours. That is a huge improvement from our previous situation. In the paper days, we sent an order to a document supplier and got a paper copy within three to four days at best, sometimes it was longer. We also use a linking system from an outside source for all of our databases. We’ve developed a system to include a shopping cart related to that system, so people can do a search, select a dozen items and go straight to the full text. We are pushing things back to the end-user, and we see that as a benefit. We don’t have a third party who is delaying access to the documents.

Q: What do you consider your greatest innovation?
A: Our document delivery service. With three people, we are supplying documents worldwide to AstraZeneca within about 17 hours. To add Rightsphere will be a huge innovation, to let people buy the rights to do what they need to with those documents, relatively simply and legally.

Q: How has your role as a librarian changed?
A: It’s become more and more global. It’s very much a global organization, so I need to know about issues in other countries. I’m not just dealing with U.K. law and U.K. practices. So there’s a lot of change.

Q: What do you see for the future of AstraZeneca’s library services?
A: The copyright and licensing function will increase. There are a lot more issues there, particularly to use the rights we’ve got effectively. We’ve probably got more rights than we use. It’s very difficult to advise people worldwide, so when in doubt we say “no, you can’t do this.” To have something like Rightsphere that could actually advise people about what they can do, helps us free up some of those rights that, perhaps, we’ve been keeping the lid on. On the library side, I don’t see us reducing purchasing services much more than we already have, because we have outsourced most of the traditional functions – book purchasing, journal purchasing and document supply. You’ve got to have a certain number of staff to manage those outsourced deliverables. I don’t see the library staff reducing anymore. We’re down to an efficient operation now.

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