We put the spotlight on Librarian Zofia Dzwig in this interview.
Tell us about yourself and your role at your institution?
I work at the TU Delft Library as a Policy Advisor, in charge of Collection Development. My role is to make sure all our students and researchers have access to the information resources they need. I decide which access models are optimal within budget and what’s available – often it’s a traditional purchase or subscription model but more and more it’s a temporary access “on demand”. I constantly investigate new acquisition models and I try to implement them in my library. TU Delft Library was the first library in the Netherlands to implement the Demand Driven Acquisition for e-books in combination with Approval Plans and is now the first one to implement a Demand Driven model for paper books.
How does your institution support the discovery of content and are you considering any new routes such as Open Access?
My Library has developed its own discovery system that will soon be replaced by a new Library Management System in the cloud. At the time of writing it is too soon to tell which system is going to be selected.
As a library we absolutely support Open Access. We have an Open Access Fund and we advise researchers about Open Access Publishing. We also participate in the national discussion about developing a policy for models combining subscriptions with APC’s.
How has your role and the library role developed over the past years and how do you see those evolving in the future?
In the past I succeeded to introduce several “tailored” access models for Collection Development. Demand Driven Acquisition is one of them but also Evidence Based Selection. Our users decide more and more on what content we offer as a library. “Client First” as we say. But also “Digital First” and “Just in Time”. No need nowadays to purchase resources in advance, we can make them available instantly at the moment when they are requested. I think the future is about subscriptions on an article level and e-books on a chapter level. And will the Abstract and Index databases survive or will Google Scholar take over?
Lastly, tell us what is important to you as a librarian working in today’s academic society where digital information is widely available, and how this may make your role even more important today?
Our library is facing severe budget cuts. This implies that we really need creative thinking in order to satisfy the needs of our students and researchers on one side and fit in our budget on the other side. My challenge is to solve this puzzle without making concessions on quality of our library collection. We call this project “Better with Less” and we hope that the publishers will cooperate with our ambitious plans.
