OCLC Research interviewed 29 library leaders from 11 countries to capture their experiences during the pandemic and understand what they envision for their libraries moving forward. This high-level briefing synthesizes findings and recommendations within the context of work experiences, collections experiences, and engagement experiences. And within each of these contexts, it identifies New Model Library transformations occurring because of four areas of impact.

Metadata in the Digital Library is a complete guide to building a digital library metadata strategy from scratch, using established metadata standards bound together by the markup language XML. The strategy laid out in this book will ensure that a digital library’s metadata will support all of its operations, be fully interoperable with others and enable its long-term preservation. It assumes no prior knowledge of metadata, XML or any of the standards that it covers. It provides both an introduction to best practices in digital library metadata and a manual for their practical implementation.

The Japanese National Diet Library announced its new vision which will set the policy for the next five years, National Diet Library Vision 2021–2025: The Digital Shift at the National Diet Library.

Seven initiatives are intended to better connect information resources with intellectual activities.

Originally presented in 2020 at the Convegno Stelline Conference (Bibliostar), this session Wikipedia and Libraries: Partnerships to reach the future highlights how OCLC has invested in partnerships with Wikimedia projects, and shares success stories from different types of institutions with a common goal of connecting communities of knowledge.

The accompanying conference paper Wikimedia and Libraries: From Vision to Practice makes an argument that libraries and Wikimedia make great partnerships that can collaborate to strengthen shared information access goals. Illustrative examples are provided from OCLC’s direct experience.

Transformative OA agreements repurpose former subscription funds to support open access publishing, enabling more research to be published openly. How can open access and open science be advanced further? An expert panel will provide important insights into future directions and opportunities for further collaboration between libraries, funders, and not-for-profit publishers, and will highlight the most effective models for driving compliance, cost restraint, diversity, and open access.

The Library of Congress announced its third release of more than 200,000 new records in its online catalog for free bulk download for research and discovery. These releases enable researchers to engage with the unparalleled and rich source metadata at the Library, inspire discovery of Library collections and provide resources to inform future discovery within the Library and data communities. The data covers a wide range of Library items including books, serials, computer files, manuscripts, cartographic materials, music, sound recordings and visual materials.  The unabridged records are easily accessible through the Library’s Selected Datasets Collection in XML and UTF8 formats. Direct access to each data set is available here. The release supports the Library’s effort to continuously expand open access to its vast collections.

The National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) has announced new and renewed funding for state projects in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), an initiative jointly sponsored with the Library of Congress and supporting the Chronicling America (ISSN 2475-2703) online collection of digitized historic newspapers. Boston Public Library, representing Massachusetts, newly joins the program, with additional awards supporting ongoing projects. These projects received two year grants to digitize up to 100,000 selected historic newspapers from their collections for contribution to the collection.

More information on program guidelines, participation, and technical information can be found at https://www.neh.gov/projects/ndnp.html or https://www.loc.gov/ndnp/.

With the announcement of her presidential theme – libraries building a sustainable future – IFLA President-elect Barbara Lison focused her session at WLIC on the long-term trends facing the library field, as defined by the emerging talents who will lead it. In a dynamic session, the President-elect, with the support of IFLA’s Secretary General Gerald Leitner, and a panel of inspiring people, led participants through a process of identifying the top priorities. Discover the 5 top ideas which will feature strongly in work undertaken during Barbara’s IFLA Presidency.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pleased to announce the implementation of the Universal Viewer for examining the thousands of digitized texts on the Digital Collections web site. Universal Viewer is an open-source community-supported software developed by Digirati for the Wellcome Library and the British Library. The NLM Digital Repository Working Group selected Universal Viewer after an in-depth software evaluation. Universal Viewer fits easily with the existing applications Digital Collections uses to present high-quality page images through the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), Loris image server and Blacklight discovery layer.

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IFLA Journal is an international journal publishing peer reviewed articles on library and information services and the social, political and economic issues that impact access to information through libraries.

The Journal publishes research, case studies and essays that reflect the broad spectrum of the profession internationally.