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Mr Lossau, how do you explain the sustained success of your library?

One of our particular strengths is raising funds from third-party donations and special grants. We are also making great efforts to enhance user-friendliness – just take a look at our extended opening hours, for example. We are open from 7 a.m. until 1 a.m. from Monday to Friday and at the weekend from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. I’m sure that played a big role in our good BIX rating as well.

You raised almost 8 million euros last year alone (2006) in funds from third-party donors and special grants. That is more than six times the average proportion of third-party funds received by two-tier university libraries. How did you manage that?

Through a combination of various factors. First of all, you need to have people with ideas on how you can develop services and the library landscape in general. If you don’t deal with that side of things, if you just concentrate on day-to-day operations, you won’t progress in this area.

But a good idea on its own is never enough. Of course, you want to get the funding for it as well. So you have to – and this brings me to the second point – familiarise yourself with the funding structures and programmes and keep up with developments on this front.

Thirdly, when you’re carrying out a large number of projects like we are, you need much stronger coordination. Our “Research and Development” department, the Digitalisation Centre and also our colleagues in the special subject collections, historic collections etc. are the “breeding grounds” for new projects funded by third-party donations.

But we also have colleagues active in the area of fundraising who have proved to be very effective in attracting special grants – for example, in the National Licences project and in the Lower Saxony Consortium.

You once said that one of the priority tasks of a modern academic library is to develop innovative new services. What is the focus of your work in this area?

We are in the process of transforming our physical libraries into worlds of learning. For example, we are setting up a learning landscape together with our medicine students which comprises a medical training centre, a learning resource centre with group work stations as well as a mixture of books and multimedia services.

In addition, we have been looking at the subject of information literacy for a quite a long time now. Here we are working towards moving beyond mere research training and integrating our services into a university-wide concept for key competencies in future.

We also want to offer our academics a publication infrastructure. There’s already the university publishing house, to which there has been a very good response. And in the digital sector we are taking care of the set-up and operation of publications and document servers as well as repositories, so that we can present the results of our university’s research to the outside world for all to see.

In your opinion what are the biggest problems facing academic libraries?

Our biggest problem is financing. The overall budget for universities is continuously being cut, which makes the competition for resources even tougher. The costs of electronic journals are a problem for us at the moment.

At the beginning of October your library and scientific publisher Springer signed an agreement to make research literature online accessible free of charge. What is special about this agreement?

What makes this agreement special is that we used our existing subscription contract as funding. In other words, we are paying a very limited sum on top of the subscription fee and this allows our authors to publish their work for free instead of paying 3000 dollars as is customary elsewhere. For us it is a way to reach our goal of open access in the long term – and in so doing to meet the demands formulated by the academic organisations in the Berlin Declaration.

In June 2007 you and the German National Library (DNB), the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung Göttingen and IBM Deutschland agreed to continue your cooperation in the field of digital long-term archiving into the future. What still has to be done in this area?

Some technical developments are still necessary because kopal, the project dedicated to long-term digital archiving, has not yet covered all formats. Furthermore, its activities were coordinated with the workflows of the German National Library (DNB) and the State and University Library Göttingen (SUB). The task is now to adapt them to other workflows.

But the most important thing is that we develop a service and business model which makes it clear who is going to be responsible for long-term archiving in Germany in future. The question remains whether the responsibility for and implementation of long-term archiving will be shared by several bodies under the management of the DNB in future. We are no closer to an answer to the question of funding either.

What are your wishes for the future?

Oh, I could name many things. I would like to see the university libraries fully integrated into the universities infrastructure planning – that in turn requires systematic infrastructure planning of this sort in the first place.

I would also like to see the task of developing digital services shared by all the different actors and then bring these services together in a large catalogue that anybody can use. One indexing service for electronic resources for all libraries would also be helpful. I fail to see why we have to licence and index the same works over and over again in different locations.

Another wish of mine would be more costs transparency on the part of the publishers. Finally, I would like to see heightened cooperation between the library and the researchers and students. We should look much more closely at the actual working conditions and processes than we have done in the past so that we can suggest new ways of improving to them.