EVALUATING THE INTELLECTUAL ASSETS OF THE SCHOLARSHIP AND COLLECTIONS DIRECTORATE AT THE BRITISH LIBRARY

This thesis aims to provide an evaluation of intellectual assets for the Scholarship and Collections Directorate (now Collections) at the British Library. Intellectual assets are assets which belong to and benefit an organization but do not have any tangible net worth, thus making it difficult to provide evidence of their value. An organization such as the British Library which is entirely dependent on the expertise of its staff, the way its collections are used and the relationships it forges with external stakeholders relies heavily on its intellectual assets and therefore a method for identifying and evaluating them in relation to the Library’s strategic aims is vitally important. This project is especially timely due to the financial constraints placed on the Library by the recent financial crisis and the changes to the Directorate’s infrastructure which have taken place since 2010.

The data for this project was gathered on site at the British Library, using largely qualitative methods. Several in-depth interviews were conducted with Scholarship and Collections staff and stakeholders, and this was supported by a questionnaire distributed to all employees of the Directorate which was designed to collect further qualitative data as well as some quantitative data to support the findings. A phenomenographical approach was used during the data analysis process. This entailed focusing on the ways that individuals experience and interact with a particular phenomenon, in this case how Scholarship and Collections staff and stakeholders interact with intellectual assets.

Several suggestions were made based on the collected data for how the Directorate could improve its utilisation of intellectual assets, which were largely concerned with encouraging a matrix culture within the Library and greater promotion of staff expertise and the services they could offer. An evaluation tool was developed which would enable users to use KPIs to generate qualitative data for evaluating intellectual assets.
As a case study, this research is naturally limited to a particular location and period in time. Limited resources also prevented certain ethnographic groups, such as British Library users, from being included. However, the model which has been developed can be adapted for application to other organisations wishing to perform an intellectual asset evaluation.

This project has formulated an intellectual asset evaluation tool which relies on qualitative methods, something which has not been fully accomplished before. It also provides a basis for the evaluation of IAs in libraries, an area of study which had not garnered much attention previously. The evaluation tool was designed so that it might be adapted for the use of other similar organisations.