ISSN integration is a project lead by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (DNB) to bring together the ISSN assignment and cataloguing, as well as the acquisition and descriptive cataloguing of e-legal deposit of serials into one workflow. Then, in the course of 2016, the German ISSN Centre will assign and catalog ISSNs directly in ZDB aka Zeitschriftendatenbank, after mapping the existing metadata format to an interoperable one (MARC21). ZDB, the German union catalog for serials, is one of the world’s biggest databases for serials (journals, annuals, newspapers etc., incl. e-journals).

The ZDB actually contains more than 1.7 million bibliographic records of serials from the 16th century onwards, from all countries, in all languages, held in 4.400 German and Austrian libraries, with 13.6 million holdings information. It is maintained by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and technically hosted by the German National Library.

As one of the results, metadata exchanges with publishers will be facilitated, noticeably with Springer, who represents 40% of ISSN assignments for pre-publications in Germany.

 

More than 150 participants from 29 countries attended the IFLA Satellite Meeting RDA – Resource Description and Access – status and perspectives 2014 on August 13th that was organized by IFLA’s Cataloguing Section at the German National Library in Frankfurt am Main.

Chaired by Hanne Hörl Hansen and Miriam Säfström a range of interesting presentations was given by prominent speakers delivering first-hand information both on the background of RDA in general (Chris Oliver) and the current status and plans of the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC) (Gordon Dunsire). The Chair of the European RDA Interest Group (RDA), Verena Schaffner, presented the activities of this group. Speakers from the United Kingdom (Thurstan Young), the RDA implementation project in the German-speaking community (Renate Behrens-Neumann), the Netherlands (Daniel van Spanje) and the Arab region (Ossama Mahmoud) reported of the implementation activities in their respective libraries or regions and/or plans to do so. A speaker from France explained the reasons why they chose another way (Francoise Leresche). Presentations on authority data and RDA (Brigitte Wiechmann and Sarah Hartmann), and on formats for encoding RDA data (Sally McCallum and Gordon Dunsire) completed the picture. Last but very important, the audience learned what is necessary when planning to translate RDA (James Henelly) and what will be the future strategies for RDA (Simon Edwards).

The purpose is to identify links between related identified entities (digital objects) in the field of information and documentation. Linked entities can be media resources, humans, and corporations, or even abstract content (times, places) that can be identified uniquely. The link model of ISLI includes three elements: a source, a target, and the link between them.

The goal is a combined rendering of different representations of rich media and a wider use of resources, as it provides interoperability.

The International Standard Link Identifier (ISLI) was approved in August at ISO. The call for candidates for the registration authority for ISO 17316 (ISLI) closed on Sept. 1st, 2014.

The 5th DataCite’s Annual Conference & Special Anniversary Celebration were held in Nancy, France, 25-26 August 2014. This year’s theme, Giving Value to Data: Advocacy, Guidance, Services has highlighted recent developments in the discovery, access and reuse of research data.

The presentations and the highlights are now available online.

How the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) struggles against poor quality open access journals by asking all of the journals in its directory to reapply on the basis of stricter criteria (10000 titles) and by giving a ‘seal’ of best practice to those which meet the highest criteria. These evolutions shall help the DOAJ to become a more useful tool for funders, librarians and researchers.

Interview of Patricia Brennan, vice president of Product and Market Strategy at Thomson Reuters, about the new platform « InCites ». The platform combines Journal Citation Reports and Journal Impact Factor information with the Essential Science Indicators, which tracks trends and highly cited authors. The platform allows for some interesting analysis including looking at collaborations between individuals and institutions.

Open Access (OA), like any other model or strategy for the dissemination of knowledge, carries with it clear benefits as well as costs and downsides. These vary depending on the OA strategy in question, and in order for OA to bring maximum benefit to the world of scholarship, its costs and benefits need be examined carefully and dispassionately so that the former can be maximized and the latter minimized.

Unfortunately, the OA advocacy community tends to resist all attempts to examine OA in this way, to the point that those who approach OA in a spirit of critical analysis (rather than celebration and evangelism) are attacked and punished. This article describes the problem, provides examples of it, and proposes strategies for promoting a more rigorous and analytical discussion of OA.

An interview of Jeffrey Beall, librarian at University of Colorado Denver, USA whose blog tracks and reports on journals and publishers that abuse open access.

The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has produced sample licences for a variety of uses within open access publishing in order to offer a wide variety of appropriate licensing terms dependent on their economic model and business strategy.

http://www.stm-assoc.org/open-access-licensing/

In response to this initiative, a large coalition which includes funders, institutions, publishers, curators and the users of public resources called on the STM Association to withdraw these licenses. According to them, in their current formulation, these licenses would limit the use, reuse and exploitation of research.

 

The « Open access: knowledge sharing and sustainable scholarly communication in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda project » was created to educate researchers and students about changing scholarly communication landscapes. The project advocates for the adoption of open-access policies and mandates by funding agencies, universities, and research organizations. It also builds capacities to set up open-access repositories and to publish open-access journals.

FOSTER (Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research) is a 2-year, EU-Funded (FP7) project, carried out by 13 partners across 8 countries. The primary aim is to produce a European-wide training programme that will help researchers, postgraduate students, librarians and other stakeholders to incorporate Open Access approaches into their existing research methodologies.

Speakers from the FOSTER consortium ran four half-day workshops in Brussels at the end of June. The courses were for project officers at the European Commission. A summary of the key points as well as the presentations’ slides are now available.

IFLA 2014 Pre-Conference satellite meeting, held in Geneva on 13-14th August, focused on the transformation aspects of both, digitized as well as born digital news media. The main theme was: « Digital Transformation and the Changing Role of News Media in the 21st Century ». All aspects of digital preservation were discussed, both from the publishers and the librarians points of views. From research data management issues to partnerships in digitisation projects, keynotes speakers have explored the challenges faced and the lessons learned from all the digitisation steps. Several case studies enabled to confront best practices and procedures, revisited with new technological advances like data and text mining, OCR and named entities recognition. A special focus has been put on e-legal deposit and newsgames as an emerging genre. At last, have been discussed how digitized news media change the approach of reading and exploring the news, for public library patrons as well as researchers in digital humanities.

http://www.itu.int/en/history/Pages/IFLA2014.aspx

The Newspapers Section open session was held in Lyon on the theme “All we need is news – knowledge production and dissemination through news media”. The keynotes speakers highlighted the consequences of digital technology in news creation, production, and dissemination as well as on the post-dissemination fate of news such as preservation of digital and hard assets, collection management, storage of physical and digital content, access and use of digital and physical news collections, and similar fates. Through the case studies and projects presented by several national libraries, practices of semantic web technologies, web harvesting and e-legal deposit management were developed.

http://conference.ifla.org/ifla80/node/388

The 13th ABES Days were held in Montpellier, France, 20-21 May 2014. Among the broached topics: the Agency’s evolution, bibliographic standards, interoperability and data mining.

The presentations’ supports and the videos are now available online (in French).

ABES (Agence bibliographique de l’enseignement supérieur / Higher Education Bibliographic Agency) is a public agency which creates and manages information-based tools and services for the University and Research communities within the framework of French national strategy.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) hosted an IFLA 2014 satellite meeting devoted to linked data on 14th August 2014. This one-day event was the opportunity to present actual realizations and practical issues such as the maintenance of systems based on linked data.

Most of the presentations’ supports are now available online (in English), and Emmanuelle Bermès’ insights (BnF/French National Library) are accessible here.

 

At the 80th IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) World Library and Information Congress on Aug. 18, 2014, in Lyon, France, IFLA introduced the Lyon Declaration on Access to Information. It calls upon member states of the United Nations (UN) to make an international commitment to use the post-2015 development agenda—intended to succeed the UN’s expiring Millennium Development Goals—to ensure that everyone has access to information. Moreover, it notes that access to information must be coupled with the ability to understand, use, and share information.

The Hiberlink project investigates how web links in online scientific and other academic articles fail to lead to the resources that were originally referenced.

In this presentation, Peter Burnhill of EDINA, University of Edinburgh, outlines how the Hiberlink project aims to address the problem of dead links in eTheses.