Past Its Shelve by Date? United Kingdom Research Reserve (UKRR): A Twenty-First-Century Strategy to Protect Our Research Information for the Future

Abstract

By the end of the twentieth century higher education libraries across the United Kingdom were struggling to find room for their ever expanding collections. In 2007 the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) provided funding for the establishment of United Kingdom Research Reserve (UKRR) Phase One—a partnership between six university libraries and the British Library (BL). This project initiated a systematic approach to the deduplication of low use research material which was also already available in robust electronic form.

Following the success of Phase One HEFCE has now made a grant of nearly £10m for Phase Two—a much more ambitious scheme open to all HE libraries working in partnership with the BL. This radical new approach to collection development represents the beginning of an important cultural change. It will see the replacement of the “just in case” model of information provision for UK researchers with a “just in time” model to release valuable space while safeguarding the national research information infrastructure.

Keywords:

• United Kingdom Research Reserve

Notes

1. Consortium of Research Libraries (renamed RLUK [Research Libraries UK] in 2008).

2. Higher Education Funding Council for England.

3. UKRR spawned the dreadful non-word deduplication for this process. Not only is this misleading, but it is also needlessly ugly and smacks of totalitarianism. It has to go, but, until we can think of a more felicitous way of describing what UKRR is doing, we're landed with it.