The National Librarian, Dr. Lenrie Olatokunbo Aina, spoke at the sensitization workshop on legal deposit compliance and ISBN & ISSN, held on 9th–10th December, 2019 hosted by the Kano State Library Board, at the Murtala Muhammed Library Complex, Kano. The well-attended event was open to publishers and members of the public, and included a tweet-storm of Dr. Aina’s speech. Dr. Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, the Governor of Kano State, was a special guest. This is one example of events in which the ISSN Centre of Nigeria participates to encourage compliance by publishers, authors, printers, academicians and government printers to international standards.

COPE has released a discussion document about predatory publishing (https://publicationethics.org/predatory-publishing-discussion-document) which contains recommendations to help researchers pinpoint fake scientific journals. COPE advises researchers to search the ISSN of the publication in the ISSN Portal and verify if the ISSN is genuine and has not been assigned to another serial publication.

At PIDapalooza, the Open Festival of Persistent Identifiers, the ISSN IC Director will give a presentation about the portfolio of services provided by the ISSN portal that is expanding to support the identification of continuing resources and share information about their preservation in the digital scholarly environment. Plans to turn the ISSN portal into a hub of identifiers for digital resources and organizations are emerging. Bring your chords and your PIDs and tune in for an innovative music piece.

See the schedule.

The German National Library (Deutsche National Bibliotek, DNB) has a new website, and as does the German ISSN Centre hosted by the DNB. Contents, functionality, user guidance and the general website design have been completely revised and technically enhanced. As an expert you will find information at the entry point DNB Professional.

The U.S. ISSN Center assigned a recordbreaking 6,341 International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSN) in 2019, an increase of 10.5 percent over fiscal 2018. Of these, 2,621 ISSN, or 41 percent, were assigned to online resources. ISSN statistics over many years show that print resources continue to be published at a steady rate. The high number of ISSN assigned to publications requested by CONSER libraries in 2019 represented the successful elimination of an arrearage of more than 1,500 titles that had accumulated, partly as a result of libraries requesting ISSN for older print titles being digitized or moved to off-site storage. In 2020, the U.S. ISSN Center plans a project for more than 5,000 titles in HathiTrust and a project to assign ISSN to science blogs. Work continues on ISSN Uplink, an ISSN web form application, workflow, and communication system.

The agenda for the asynchronous RSC meeting, held 6-9 January 2020, has been posted on the RSC website.

Three papers associated with agenda items being discussed have also been posted and are linked from the agenda.

• String encoding schemes in RDA Toolkit,
• RDA content elements, which discusses the aggregates model,
• RDA content elements Appendix.

Community feedback on these papers via your regional representative is most welcome.

Tina Buck, Electronic Resources Librarian, University of Central Florida, will present NISO’s PIE-J recommended practices at ER&L (Electronic Resources and Libraries) annual conference to be held on 10 March 2020 in Austin, Texas, USA. PIE-J addresses presentation of titles and ISSNs throughout a journals’ lifespan. Such presentation is critical for accurate citations, link resolver functionality, and general ease of use. But is PIE-J being followed? This session will assess several publisher/platform displays of journal landing pages and article level screens.

Look at the full schedule.

Leading scholars and publishers from ten countries have agreed upon a definition of predatory publishing that can protect scholarship. Everyone agrees that predatory publishers sow confusion, promote shoddy scholarship and waste resources. What is needed is a consensus on a definition of predatory journals. This would provide a reference point for research into their prevalence and influence, and would help in crafting coherent interventions.

OCLC has been awarded a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a shared “Entity Management Infrastructure” that will support linked data management initiatives underway in the library and scholarly communications community. When complete, this infrastructure will be jointly curated by the community and OCLC, and will ultimately make scholarly materials more connected and discoverable on the web. OCLC will publish URIs and metadata for the entities via the web, and will provide methods for library staff to edit, enrich and add to this set of entities.

Using tools for the statistical analysis of national data on Shared Conservation Plans for Periodicals, Abes, the French Bibliographic Agency of Higher Education, has carried out this quantitative and qualitative state of the art study for the main purpose of managers, but also for library professionals, whether or not involved in projects of this type. The study highlights 36 Shared Conservation Plans for Periodicals, either thematic or regional. The study focuses on the analysis of the quality of bibliographic and holdings, underlining the importance of having records from the ISSN Registry managed by ISSN International Centre, if possible enriched by the cataloguing work specific to the Sudoc, the French union catalogue produced by higher education and research libraries and documentation centres.

Article in French

IFLA has published the 2019 Update of its Trend Report. As the latest in a series looking at the key issues and developments that shape the world in which libraries operate, it offers a basis for reflection and long-term thinking in the field. The IFLA Trend Report is the result of the dialogue between the library field and experts from a range of disciplines. You can download the document.

The Trend Report website offers a range of data and  information for libraries to use, share and build on.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has opened 2020 registration for LibQUAL+®, a leading library customer satisfaction assessment tool. For the past 20 years, libraries have depended on LibQUAL+ survey data to evaluate the needs and satisfaction levels of their users. With LibQUAL+, libraries are able to access raw data and comments to identify priorities, successes, and concerns. Since 2000, LibQUAL+ has been utilized by 1,390 libraries in 35 countries. It has helped libraries gather over 2.8 million responses, with 37% of respondents providing additional comments.

The Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section (SOCRS) and IFLA Committee on Standards have issued a call for papers for IFLA WLIC 2020. More information available at https://2020.ifla.org/conference-programme/calls-for-papers/ .

In the past few years, the National Library of Finland has been developing its subject authorities towards a more easily reusable linked data format. Old string-based monolingual thesauri have been transformed into multilingual machine readable indexing “ontologies”, and a new linked data vocabulary service called Finto has been set up for the dissemination of the new type of vocabularies. A culmination point in this development was reached in the summer of 2019, when the production of subject authorities was permanently moved away from the library databases into a completely linked data based environment. In the process all old bibliographic records with subject indexing in the Finnish Libraries’ Union Catalog were converted to host the new form of concepts.

Center for Research Libraries and East View Information Services have released Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Newspapers, the second collection of titles digitized under the Global Press Archive (GPA) CRL Charter Alliance. MENA Newspapers adds to the growing collection of Open Access material available through East View’s Global Press Archive® program.

The PKP 2019 International Scholarly Publishing Conference was held on 20-22 November 2019 at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Attended by more than 150 community members from around the world, six workshops, five keynotes, and more than 30 presentations took place. Read the Swedish OJS-network’s report.

The presentations are online.

The HathiTrust Research Center offers a workshop series to develop a community of users, teachers, and supporters of computational text analysis with HathiTrust data. Each training event is 1.5 days long and consists of a full day train-the-trainer session for librarians and a half day introduction to text mining with HathiTrust session for researchers. This new series, which will span from March to May 2020, builds on previous train-the-trainer workshops from HTRC.

Learn more about hosting | attending.

At the end of its mission (2017 – 2019), the Scientific Publishing Steering Committee reports on its actions, the studies carried out under its responsibility, their results, and issues recommendations to support French scientific publishing.

Download the report.

Article and report in French.

A study reveals that research scientists in Ghana may have more awareness of predatory journals than expected, but they may lack the training or tools necessary for deciding whether or not a journal is legitimate.

The 2020 annual Council of Voting Members Meeting will be held in Chicago on Thursday, April 23, 2020. The meeting will be followed on April 23-24 by a Global Resources Collections Forum, where librarians, specialists and researchers from CRL libraries will share information and thinking on major collection development and preservation topics, and help shape CRL collections and programs.

See the presentations for 2019.

COAR 2020 Annual Meeting & General Assembly will take place in Lima (Peru) hosted by CONCYTEC in collaboration with LA Referencia.

Topic: Fostering Diversity in Scholarly Communication

More information to come very soon.

The Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) is dedicated to advancing the practice of digital preservation and archiving. It brings together practitioners, industry experts and researchers to share experience in a vendor-neutral forum on how to put preservation and archiving into practice.

The Committee on Cataloging: Description & Access will meet during ALA 2020 Midwinter Meeting.

The agenda is online.

Please find all ALCTS Midwinter 2020 events schedule.

Within an Open Science framework, implementing Responsible Research practices requires knowledge and skills. LIBER’s Digital skills for Library staff and researchers Working Group and FIT4RRI are presenting this webinar to help foster skills development in Academia throughout Europe. 

Join fellow library leaders and members of the OCLC Europe, Middle East and Africa Regional Council (EMEARC) to discuss and discover how we can build not only future-forward libraries but also future-ready communities.

The agenda is online.

Look at the full schedule!

A symposium on the Future of Libraries is also organised from 25 to 27 January 2020.