University Library: Change and Development in its Services, 1975–2003

Oliver Pickering

The following account was written in 2003 to form a chapter in a volume intended to celebrate the centenary of the in 2004 but which was later abandoned. I am publishing it now (April 2021) as a small contribution to UK academic library history. At the time of writing I was Deputy Head of the Special Collections department.

On 14 October 1975 Harold Macmillan, the former prime minister, officially opened the University’s new South Library and in so doing inaugurated a fresh phase of Leeds University Library’s history. By his side were the Vice-Chancellor, Lord Boyle, in whose memory the building would later be renamed, and the University Librarian, Dennis Cox, who had worked hard to make the vision a reality. The remarkable growth of the Library, creating a need for ever more space, constitutes one of the main themes of its history during the last thirty years. Others are the increasing attention paid to meeting users' needs and, of course, the exploitation of information technology, which on that day in 1975 had hardly begun.1 The earlier part of the twentieth century had fallen, in Library terms, into two almost equal halves: before and after the opening of the in 1936 and the accompanying arrival of the Brotherton Collection, Lord Brotherton’s private library of rare books and manuscripts. The Brotherton family’s gifts and bequests had transformed the reputation of Leeds University Library, and Richard Offor and B.S. 'Tony' Page, Librarians 1919-47 and 1947-69, now had a magnificent building to fill. The collections grew rapidly after the Second World War, necessitating the insertion of a mezzanine floor in the 1950s. By 1968, when Dennis Cox in practice assumed the Librarianship, the situation was becoming critical. The moment coincided with unprecedented growth in student numbers and with international developments in academic library provision, specifically the concept of a self-contained ‘student library’. Thus it was that the South Library, when it opened, contained both the science and engineering research collections – greatly relieving the pressure on the Brotherton Library – and a large and specially assembled collection of undergraduate textbooks (the Student Library), available either for seven-day loan or for reference only. There

1 Much of the material in this chapter derives, in documentary terms, from the Annual Reports of the Librarian and the Library’s Readers’ Newsletter (which was published from 1992 to 1998). It also draws on unpublished Library sources and on information provided by long-standing current and retired members of staff, to whom I am very grateful. 2 was also a purpose-built audio-visual area. Altogether it was a pioneering development – the first separate student library in the UK – and so successful in attracting users that for many undergraduates the Brotherton (not so happily) became almost unknown.2 The South Library was also in marked architectural contrast to the circular Brotherton, with its dome, marble pillars, and long wooden tables. Built over six floors, the new library’s outstanding features were a large central void, allowing an overview of almost the whole building, and the stepping of the upper floors at their outer edges, which enabled the creation of private reading carrels out of each other’s sight and out of direct sunlight. The building as a whole provided space for 300,000 volumes and 1,250 readers. The modular nature of its construction, which it had in common with the other buildings of the great expansion of the University in the 1960s and 1970s by the firm of Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, was to prove its worth more than twenty years later when it acquired an extension to the south. The relatively poor accommodation for staff (though no worse than in the Brotherton) and recurrent problems with services, especially heating and ventilation, came to be seen as typical of the building type and period. The advent of the Student Library brought new procedures with it. While the acquisition and cataloguing of materials for the main collections continued on traditional lines (although from 1974-75 on the basis of the recently established Anglo- American Cataloguing Rules, a change that brought great benefits to catalogue users), Student Library books were bought to formula and received only the scantiest of descriptions. It was anticipated that the stock would continually change to keep up to date with reading lists, and that permanent records would not be needed. Furthermore, while the main libraries continued with slips and cards – although experimenting throughout the 1970s with a range of semi-automated methods of producing them – the Student Library catalogue was output on microfilm, in multiple copies, and used simplified classmarks. These were rational decisions, and it could not then be foreseen that the way forward was through standardisation of practice within the Library, not diversification. Automation proper had been introduced to the Library’s circulation system – the control of book borrowing – as early as 1973 with the purchase of an ALS computer, which worked with punched tickets for books and users, and updated its records overnight, offline. It survived until 1983, to the frustration of staff who had to cope daily with swathes of print-out. The decision to automate book borrowing (and to introduce AACR-based cataloguing for the main collections) stemmed from a recommendation from two members of staff whom Dennis Cox, always concerned to modernise the Library's practices, had far-sightedly set to work on rethinking existing systems and structures.

2 For details see D. Cox, ‘The South Library’, University of Leeds Review, 19 (1976), 27-33.

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As the 1970s wore on the use of the University libraries increased rapidly, and by 1979-80 the number of loans totalled over half a million a year. Whereas the Medical and Dental libraries had moved together into spacious new accommodation in the University’s Worsley Building in 1977, and the library at St James’s Hospital into new premises in 1979 (the Law Library, too, was to benefit from an extension in 1981), pressure on the main buildings was exacerbated by the continuous growth in stock and by the closure of other self-contained ‘sectional’ libraries: Agriculture in 1975 and Education in 1979. In the latter case the transfer of stock resulted in the erection of extensive metal shelving in the ambulatory of the Brotherton reading room, a disfigurement that remained until 1993. 1975 also saw the beginning of departmental library closures – books again flowing into the main libraries – following a decision to reduce and then end the allocations made to them from central funds. In all these circumstances the University had little choice but to prolong – and keep on prolonging – the Library’s temporary occupancy of the second and third floors of the Parkinson Building. When the West Building at last opened in 1993 the collections in medieval and modern history and modern languages had lived a separate life up there for twenty-one years. The early 1980s represented a relatively low point in the Library’s affairs. The euphoria of achieving the South Library was in the past, and the benefits of computerisation were still known only in theory. The buildings were filling up, and financial pressures on the whole university system were fast increasing, leaving the Library to have to fight for money. The first cancellation of periodical subscriptions had taken place as early as 1976-77, and by 1981 both services and staffing levels were suffering. For a time opening hours were cut, provoking a student work-in in early 1982. It was much longer before the Library was again staffed adequately. But in other ways it began to move forwards again, with the University's recognition that computerisation, at least, had to be funded. Cataloguing – though not the public catalogue – was automated in 1981, the barcoding of books began in 1982, and in 1983 the ALS computer was at last replaced, at great expense, by an online Geac circulation system. (The first Geac computer lasted eight years, to be superseded by a larger model of the same make in 1991.) Loans of books had increased by some 90% in the intervening decade. By 1983 the Library was also offering searches of online bibliographical databases to researchers in (particularly) science, engineering and medicine, although it would be 1991 before users first had the ability to search such resources for themselves. In 1982-83 the Library also received a welcome boost to its book purchasing grant, but the rate of overall acquisition of materials had never significantly slackened. Books and manuscripts do not, after all, always have to be bought. The early and mid- 1980s saw the arrival of the vast political and personal archive of Lord Boyle, who had died in 1981; the beginnings of the Leeds Russian Archive; and the deposit of very large collections of Quaker printed books and archives, and of the old library and archives of 4

Ripon Cathedral. It was, however, the assiduous work of the Library’s team of subject consultants – freed by Dennis Cox from more routine 'housekeeping' duties – that contributed, day by day, to the consolidation of the arts and humanities collections into a nationally significant resource. The holdings in history, English, Chinese, French, and other modern languages particularly stand out, as do the research materials in microform. Dennis Cox’s retirement in 1986 happily coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the Brotherton Collection, which was marked by the publication of a celebratory book,3 but Cox himself had presided over a more than doubling of the size of the Library’s holdings, achieved as a result of his persistent advocacy, to the University, of the importance of having research collections. Alongside his other achievements – modernising and reorganising the Library's ways of working, providing it with new accommodation, ceaselessly developing the collections – Dennis Cox had helped initiate two other major developments whose full effects were not felt until the librarianship of his successor, Reg Carr: the move towards an online public catalogue (to which end Cox had visited American libraries in 1984) and the establishment (in 1985) of CURL, the Consortium of University Research Libraries, of which he was the first Chairman. The two were closely linked, in that it was recognised that the most efficient way for the UK’s leading academic libraries to overcome the technical challenge of computerising their catalogues was to move forwards together. One result was the creation of the CURL database, allowing member libraries to share catalogue records without further charge. The end of the practice by which individual libraries catalogued everything from scratch was a very significant change. Reg Carr, who had come to Leeds from an even bigger university library, Cambridge, was an enthusiastic supporter of CURL and of the increasingly cooperative ways of working that have distinguished the UK library scene since the beginning of the 1990s. (Carr became Secretary of CURL, and for a time the CURL office was based in the Library.) The adoption of common cataloguing formats and standards has led, most noticeably, to the CURL union catalogue, COPAC, which today includes the records of the British Library itself. Traditionalists may take comfort, however, from the fact that Leeds has not abandoned its unique classification scheme. Meanwhile the online catalogue at Leeds – the OPAC – gathered pace in a piecemeal, cumulative way, as it had to. The conversion of records for the stock of the Medical and Dental Library was finished in time for autumn 1986, and work on Edward Boyle Library records (main and student collections) at once followed, although it was another five years before that phase was complete – indeed retrospective conversion of the rump of Brotherton Library records still continues. The arrival of the OPAC brought with it two major concomitant developments: Leeds’s holdings could for the first time be inspected remotely via computer networks, and catalogue records for

3 The Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds: Its Contents Described with Illustrations of Fifty Books and Manuscripts (Leeds, 1986). 5 new acquisitions became available in online format only, marking a fundamental change in the status of the Library’s old ‘slip’ catalogue, which became effectively moribund in 1991. The day-to-day life of the Library was transformed in other ways in the late 1980s when computer terminals for personal use began to be introduced. One result was that computer literacy, as opposed to typing skills, became an issue, and staff and users both found they had much to learn. Arts researchers, like their scientific colleagues, became increasingly aware of online resources, while the new technology provided impetus, within the Library, for bibliographic projects of different kinds, including the British Education Index, which moved to Leeds as a self-financing unit in 1986, and ‘BCMSV’, a database catalogue of the Brotherton Collection’s extensive holdings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English manuscript verse. But space and budgetary problems were again to the fore as the 1980s ended. A University financial crisis in late 1987 contributed to a general moratorium on book purchases during the spring and early summer of 1988, and – as often at this time – there were no new purchases of periodical titles. The following year charges for inter- library loans were introduced, at first merely nominal, later more substantial. The same financial problems continued into the 1990s, and even when shortfalls in the main book fund were made good – spending on the Student Library was normally protected – it proved difficult to make up lost ground, especially with the increase in the price of library materials moving ahead of general price inflation. However, money was found from external sources in 1988 for the purchase of the Liddle Collection, a very extensive First World War personal experience archive, and there was also a much-needed major refurbishment of the Brotherton Library’s ageing electrical, heating, and security systems. By 1991, fortunately, the most significant development since the opening of the South Library was in sight: the building of an extension to the Brotherton Library, which had been calculated in 1987 to be 97% full. Reg Carr pressed the case consistently, the University Funding Council acknowledged the need, and the University decided that the extension should be built to the rear of the Brotherton on ground occupied by the Food Science department – which had first to be provided with a new building of its own. Site clearance began in early 1992, the construction work continuing for eighteen months. The hole in the ground would have been deeper if the original plan for two basement floors had been carried through, but geological and financial problems intervened. Meanwhile 1990-91 had witnessed several developments that were indicative of the changed institutional world in which the Library was beginning to operate. One was the introduction of a centrally-organised staff training programme, in the form of forty-five minutes set aside every Friday morning (delaying public opening until 9.30 am) for activities ranging from talks by senior members of the University to advice on how to treat Library users. Another was the publication of the Library’s first 6 management plan, looking ahead over the whole period 1991-95. A less dramatic change, brought about by the simplification of the University’s committee structure, was the disbanding, at the end of 1991, of the long-standing Library Executive Committee and Library Consultative Committee. Instead a new Committee on Central Academic Services was created, aligning the Library for the first time with, most significantly, the Computing Service. A re-alignment of a different kind, demonstrating the Library’s growing reputation within the University, resulted from the decisions, in 1992 and 1994 respectively, to detach first the University Art Collections and Gallery and then the University Archive from the central administration and place them instead under the Library’s wing. The West Building, as the new extension to the Brotherton was known, opened to users in the late summer of 1993. It occupied four floors, with access provided by a new corridor slicing at an angle out of the rear of the round reading room, thus preserving the position of the Librarian’s Room at the end of a central East-West axis. As with the void letting light into what was by now the Edward Boyle Library, the most striking architectural feature of the West Building was the two-storey glass-roofed atrium projecting from the Brotherton’s former outside wall, now painted white. This was made the reading area for new issues of journals. Beyond it were the collections for education and government publications, while the floor below was given over to other social sciences, to classics and theology, and to an array of ‘stack’ and specialist collections, largely accommodated on compact mobile shelving, previously seen only in closed, staff areas. In eliminating the need for fixed space between shelf-ranges the stratagem undoubtedly worked, but at the cost of some complaints from users and a general impression of over-density. The truth was that the new building was largely full from the start, for its opening meant that the Library had had to give up its accommodation in the Parkinson Building, and the huge task of rehousing the extensive collections displaced from that area resulted in every book in the Brotherton being moved. The West Building showed itself to better advantage as one climbed higher. The upper two floors became the home of an amalgamated Special Collections department, bringing together the Brotherton Collection and the rest of the Library’s special collections, which until then had been locked behind large wire-mesh cages in the Brotherton basement, most unsatisfactory for staff and researchers alike. The approach to the combined department was along an airy new corridor cut through from the Brotherton gallery, passing the old Brotherton Collection reading room (which now became available for seminars, exhibitions, and receptions) and looking down on users at work in the atrium. Beyond it was a spacious reception area and reading room, fitted out in oak, with two floors of book stacks behind. The corridor itself was equipped with custom-built exhibition cases in time for the formal opening of the West Building by Sir Anthony Kenny in April 1995 (when the cases were filled with exhibits lent by Leeds's partner-libraries in CURL). It is no exaggeration to say that 7 the work of Special Collections was transformed out of all recognition by its new accommodation, but it was not the only department to benefit from the West Building. Library office staff moved into the old cataloguing room, much refashioned, while cataloguing and acquisitions staff moved into another generously-proportioned arm of the extension. It was not only new accommodation that had such an effect on the Special Collections department in the 1990s. In 1992 the Higher Education Funding Council initiated a major review of library provision in UK higher education, under the chairmanship of Sir Brian Follett. When the committee reported in December 1993 its recommendations – which were accepted by the government, and backed up by a substantial amount of new money – included generous encouragement for libraries to propose large-scale projects that would enhance knowledge of and access to their research collections in the humanities. Leeds took full advantage of the opportunities on offer and had great success with its bids in this area, which it submitted in October 1994. The most tangible results, taking effect from 1995 and spread over the rest of the decade, all affected Special Collections, as was not surprising: opening hours were extended, database and microfilming work was funded, a well-equipped Conservation Studio was created (and staffed), and, most noticeably, a five-year programme to create computerised catalogue records for all printed material in the department was established. One positive outcome of this major cataloguing effort, as the Follett committee must have hoped, was increased use of Special Collections, especially by undergraduates and by researchers in other libraries, as records for its books began to appear in the Library OPAC alongside those for books on the open shelves. The success of the Follett bids also brought Leeds its first real experience of project work, as staff funded from the central payroll were joined by considerable numbers of colleagues on temporary contracts paid for by external money. Meanwhile 1994 brought significant developments elsewhere in the Library system. Opening hours were extended, to include Saturday afternoons and much longer evening opening in the Brotherton. The computer catalogue began to take in fresh areas, including St James's Hospital medical library and the complete holdings of the Edward Boyle Library Counter Collection (photocopied articles and book chapters in especially high demand). A stand-alone Chinese computer catalogue made its appearance in the Brotherton, and users of the Law Library at last had the benefit of a computerised issue system. The Edward Boyle Library came under increasing pressure as a result of the introduction of modular courses, following the University's decision to move to a semesterised system. The Counter Collection grew rapidly to take account of increased demand, and a major remodelling of much of the Edward Boyle Library entrance level was carried out over the summer to take account of its need for much greater space. The Medical and Dental Library, and its counterpart at St James's Hospital, both also received facelifts to their issue counters in response to increased demand, taking effect in early 1995. And it was not only the University Archive (as 8 mentioned above) that transferred to the Library in 1994; so also did the Information Resource Centre based in a separate University department, the Nuffield Institute of Health. The onward march of information technology led also, in 1993-94, to a dramatic increase in computer provision for Library staff. Seventy new personal computers were purchased, revolutionising working methods for professional staff, particularly with the introduction of PC-based electronic mail. This development, together with the ever-increasing range of services now available to users from networked computers, led in spring 1994 to the establishment of a new Library department, the Systems Team. This coincided with the realisation of a project that had been eighteen months in the planning, the creation of networked access to the Library's rapidly growing collection of CD-ROM databases. The development was immediately popular, and transformed the activity of literature searching, especially when the service was extended to the whole campus in the autumn; not surprisingly, demand for the inter-library loan service increased markedly. (To publicise the new service the Library commissioned a twenty-minute training video, ‘Find out Fast’, in which a member of staff played a leading role.) The CD-ROM network was significant enough, but in August 1994 computer users everywhere could for the first time discover information about the Library via the new World Wide Web – an information delivery system that would, as it turned out, supersede CD-ROMs surprisingly quickly, and overtake also the Library's introduction (in 1995) of a separate computer-based Library Guidance System. In response to these changes a Networked Information Officer was appointed in 1995, primarily to assist with training and publicity; it was initially a joint appointment with the Computing Service and Media Services. Two particular IT developments that year involved, for the first time, experiments with digitisation. One was a project (funded by the University's Academic Development Fund) to digitise and then network parts of the Counter Collection. The other was the Internet Library of Early Journals, a joint venture with , Manchester, and Oxford universities that was funded by the national ‘eLib’ (electronic libraries) programme, yet another outcome of the groundbreaking Follett report. Both projects were intended to test new technologies, and ILEJ, in particular, had very tangible results, making available twenty-year runs of three eighteenth-century and three nineteenth-century journals. It was, of course, merely one of a large number of projects by then under way worldwide to make electronic journals and other texts available over the internet, access to which was increasingly being offered from the Library's ever-developing Web pages. Two self-financing units within the Library also moved forward technically in the mid-1990s. In 1993 the former Oncology Information Service, based in the Medical and Dental Library, was relaunched as Leeds Medical Information and began to publish its databases in machine-readable form. And in 1996 the British Education Index received 9 major grants enabling it to begin Web-based publishing and to commence a new database, Education-line. In 1995 the number of registered Library users totalled close on 34,000 (reflecting the increase in the size of the overall student body), with the number of loans running at c. 850,000 a year, an increase of more than 50% on the figure ten years earlier (c. 560,000). As one method of coping, a controlled system of access to the main Library sites, dependent on ID cards, was introduced in January, to ensure that use of the Library's collections was restricted to those entitled to enter the buildings. The Library, as the largest research library to the east of the Pennines, had traditionally welcomed bona fide external users, and in the late 1960s had offered borrowing facilities to staff and postgraduate students at other Yorkshire universities. By the late 1980s, however, when financial pressures combined with increasing competition between universities, this practice began to be questioned, with the result that charges had been introduced. (By 2003, which saw a variety of new regional and national cooperative loan schemes in operation, free of charge, the wheel had turned once more.) Nevertheless there was still concern that too many outsiders were taking advantage of collections that had essentially been purchased for the benefit of Leeds staff and students. However, the only real means of responding to the continued pressure on the Edward Boyle Library – and to the burgeoning demand for access to networked computers – was to extend the building. Fortunately the Higher Education Funding Council had accepted the Follett committee's recommendation that there should also be more money for capital building projects, and it agreed, in May 1995, to contribute 25% of the costs of a six-floor extension to the Edward Boyle at its south end. Work on site began in February 1996, and the Learning Centre, as it was called, eventually opened to users in summer 1997, equipped with 225 computer workstations and with 400 additional reading places. The benefits of the extension were felt by the Library as a whole. Not only were there IT training rooms, new staff offices and (once again) an extended counter area, but the opportunity was taken to build in a large conference room, particularly valuable now that the Library staff complement was rising towards two hundred. The Learning Centre was distinctive externally, also, successfully softening the austere rectangular concrete of the original building with a sloping curved roof and extensive use of brickwork. Building work went on elsewhere also. The Clothworkers' Library housed in the Department of Textile Industries was extended in early 1996 as a result of a grant from the Clothworkers' Foundation of London. On a larger scale, planning began for a major expansion of the Medical and Dental Library, much needed following the merger of Leeds College of Health with the University in April 1996: one result was the closure of the College's outlying libraries and the integration of their stock (and staff) with that of the main medical and dental collections, a process that was not complete until 1999. 10

In January 1996 Reg Carr was appointed to the additional post of Dean of Information Strategy, to take responsibility for implementing policy in this area across the University. Later that year, however – and before the potential of the appointment could bear fruit – he accepted the post of Bodley's Librarian and Director of Library Services in the University of Oxford, and left Leeds at Christmas. During his ten years as Librarian he had both overseen major building projects and taken the Library decisively into the new information age, with the full establishment of the Library OPAC and the networking of many other electronic resources. He had greatly enhanced the Library's research holdings and status, not least through continuous support for its Special Collections and recognition of the potential offered by the recommendations of the Follett Report. And he had been active nationally and internationally in academic librarianship, playing a leading role in the CURL consortium – whose database of machine-readable catalogue records became public as COPAC in April 1996 – and in its relationship with the Research Libraries Group of America, which the CURL libraries joined in 1994. Following Reg Carr's departure there was an interregnum of seven months while his successor was sought. Two highly significant events took place during this period, for the duration of which the two deputy librarians, Roger Davis and Hugh Wellesley-Smith, were appointed Co-Acting Librarians. First, an Innopac computer system was chosen to replace the ageing Geac, and when it was inaugurated in autumn 1997 it transformed public access to the Library catalogue, in having a quick and responsive Web interface. The whole experience of searching the catalogue suddenly changed, and with Innopac the Leeds OPAC can be said properly to have come of age. Secondly, the University commissioned external consultants to study the staffing and management of the Library in order to provide an independent view of the situation for the new Librarian. The consultants proceeded to recommend numerous changes, and their message was to be very sympathetically received. Lynne Brindley, formerly Librarian and Director of Information Services at the London School of Economics, succeeded Reg Carr as University Librarian on 1 August 1997. Inheriting a Library with outstanding research collections, an impressive range of buildings, and a sound IT infrastructure, she came to Leeds with a determination to derive full value from these assets by developing its services for users. She was already a national figure in the field, and had a clear vision of the ways in which electronic resources could and inevitably would transform teaching and research. She also initiated great change in the Library's staffing structure and methods of management. An Organisational Development Steering Group was soon established, with both Library and non-Library members. A Human Resources Officer, a Staff and Departmental Development Officer, and a Head of Reader Services were quickly appointed – in due course a whole new tier of middle management was to emerge – but the central focus of the new organisational structure was the Library's subject consultants, who in the course of 1998 were formed into teams matching the different 11

University faculties; it was these faculty teams that were to exemplify the need for a more proactive approach to the Library's users, especially the academic departments. Related developments were the introduction of training in change management, and the initiation of thorough reviews of the activities of different sections of the Library. A major change of a different kind occurred in August 1998 when Lynne Brindley, only a year into her Librarianship, was additionally appointed Pro-Vice- Chancellor for Communications and Information Technology. The need to compensate the Library for the loss of her time was met, without delay, by the appointment of Janet Wilkinson, Deputy Librarian at the London School of Economics, to a new post of Director of Strategic Development (Library), with the specific task of taking the development programme forward. Many of the changes focused on staff development, with emphasis on financial and project-management skills, as budgets were devolved, on liaison and presentational skills, to enable staff to be more active in promoting the Library and teaching the effective exploitation of resources, and on performance management and team-working skills, as managers were given responsibility for developing the performance of teams and team members. Impetus towards achieving this third aspect, in particular, came from the Library's decision to work towards obtaining an Investors in People award, which it received in 2001 after two years’ preparation. Further changes in ways of working included the introduction of operational plans and key performance indicators for the different sections of the Library. These developments, and the need for staff to spend an increasing proportion of time on issues surrounding electronic resources, resulted in a shift away from more traditional professional roles, and the new arrangements did not suit everybody. In the period 1999-2001 a considerable number of long-serving staff, many of whom held senior posts, decided to take advantage of generous opportunities to retire early, and the Library's professional staff profile altered markedly as a result. There was no doubt, however, that other staff were enthusiastic about change and relished the new opportunities for career advancement. The loss in terms of knowledge of the collections, though great, was accompanied by a move towards involving the academic departments much more than previously in the selection of resources for the research collections, an area that Library staff had tended to regard as their own preserve. A main reason for this was the perception, by the departments, that the Library had in the past been rather too secretive about the way in which it had spent its book funds. The desire now was for the Library to present a much more transparent face to the departments, explaining to them how much money was available – and how it was calculated – and involving them in decisions about expenditure. Much time and effort was put into devising a resource allocation model, which evolved over two years in the light of experience and new factors. Not all the academic departments responded with equal enthusiasm to the amount of work that was now being asked of them – for example involvement, on an individual basis, in a very extensive periodicals voting 12 exercise in 2001 – but the Library's efforts in this area and others (including support for the Teaching Quality Assessment and Research Assessment exercises) were generally appreciated. The changes described above were largely initiated by Lynne Brindley but not completed by her, for in the summer of 2000, after a Librarianship of three years, she left Leeds to become Chief Executive of the British Library. Janet Wilkinson, who was already effectively driving the developments, was appointed in her place (in June 2000), which meant that the Library was able to continue on its new path with a minimum of further disruption. She was assisted by a Senior Management Group that came eventually to comprise otherwise not only the Head of Learning and Research Support and the Head of Special Collections but, in two significant appointments, a Head of Resources and Financial Services (a qualified accountant, reflecting a much-needed professionalisation of roles in a number of key management areas) and a Head of e- Strategy and Development. Meanwhile the need to cope with an ever-growing number of Library users had combined with technical advances to bring about major developments in the reader services area. Thus it became possible for users to reserve (and later renew) books for themselves via the Innopac system; telephone renewals were introduced; and book bins (for the return of books) and so-called self-issue machines made their appearance, at first in the perpetually busy Edward Boyle Library. The pressures inevitably imposed by increased numbers of students also meant that new ways of informing them about the Library’s services and collections had to be found. Faculty-team members began to devote substantial amounts of time to teaching information skills and the use of resources, particularly to undergraduates, and the Library was successful in attracting money for development projects in the area, most notably the Hybrid Library project (2000-01) and ‘The Big Blue’ (2002-03), a nationally funded project, managed jointly with Manchester Metropolitan University, to survey present practice in information skills training for students in higher and further education. A little earlier, new training rooms were a prominent feature of the extension to the Medical and Dental Library, completed in summer 1999. With the final integration of the outlying healthcare libraries its name was then changed to the Health Sciences Library, and a Health Sciences faculty team was created, taking its place alongside those for the other faculties. Changes in other areas were less obvious to the Library's users. The Technical Processes division, after a long review, re-emerged as Collection Management Services; as elsewhere, catalogue records were now downloaded from existing bibliographic databases whenever possible, while the facilities offered by the Innopac system (for example, periodicals check-in) were exploited to a greater extent. The Library Office was reorganised and the office area in the Brotherton extensively refurbished. Special Collections also went through a process of change, resulting in noticeably greater liaison with the faculty teams and a clearer management structure. Equally important 13 was the introduction, in January 2000, of a new system of computer-based manuscript cataloguing, allowing the output of records both to the Library OPAC and also in specialised archival format, which enabled the department to contribute 1700 records, in 2001-02, to the Archives Hub, a new national union catalogue for manuscripts and archives in higher education institutions. The holdings of Special Collections had never ceased to expand. An especially large arrival had been the 14,000-volume personal library of Sir Herbert Read in 1997, but there were other major acquisitions in the areas of twentieth-century literary and theatrical archives. The department also showed itself hospitable to activities not always involving its own holdings. When in 2000 the University appointed a Collections Officer the post-holder was assigned to the care of Special Collections, where the Art Gallery and Collections already had their base, and the department had earlier played host to the Artists' Papers Register, a project jointly funded by the University and the Henry Moore Foundation. Elsewhere the need to rationalise space and cut costs, together with a desire to offer the same high level of service to all Library users, resulted in the closure of the remaining sectional libraries: the Law Library in summer 2000, the Information Resource Centre in the Nuffield Institute in summer 2001, and the Clothworkers Library in summer 2002. The resulting pressure on space in the Brotherton, Health Sciences, and Edward Boyle libraries, to which their book stock variously moved, meant that new stores had urgently to be found. The acquisition in 2002 of a large basement area in one of the Chemistry buildings represented a good start, but it was clear that more radical solutions would have to be considered, pending, in the longer term, the benefits likely to flow from an increasing shift towards electronic resources and possible collaborative approaches to collection development with other academic libraries in the region. The situation was made more acute by the University's decision to take over and integrate Bretton Hall College, twenty miles to the south of Leeds, a merger that took place in August 2001. The knock-on effects for the Library – as for many academic departments – were huge, bearing particularly heavily on the reader services area in that the library at Bretton became part of Leeds University Library, but also having major implications for the faculty teams and for decisions about the location of book stock. At the same time the Library opened an outpost at Wakefield, where the University had established a small additional campus. And so as some outlying libraries closed, others sprang up. One certainty, as the University celebrates the centenary of its charter, is that electronic methods of delivering information and resources to Library users – and of running the Library itself – will become ever more important, including in ways not yet foreseeable. From providing local electronic reading-lists, linked to the Library OPAC, to ensuring that full-text resources from sites around the world can be delivered straight to the researcher's desktop – and in meeting the challenge of a situation where physical books are likely to retain their importance for years to come – the 14

Library has a crucial role to play, and believes itself to be well positioned. The era of grand building projects may be over, but the electronic edifice of the future is still under construction.