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.
With 2020 just around the corner, the achievements of this year are reflected with a highlight on what will be delivered in the months ahead.
In the face of evolving user needs, many academic libraries are reimagining the services they offer. As instruction moves online, how can libraries best provide support for teaching and learning? As research becomes more reliant on data, computation, and collaboration, where can libraries best add value? As colleges welcome more diverse student populations and greater contingent faculty labor to campus, what is the library’s role? As budgets shrink, how should a library prioritize which resources and services to provide?
The Charleston Conference and Against the Grain released an initial selection from the 2019 Charleston Conference “Views from the Penthouse Suite” video interviews. Another set of interviews was released, featuring a number of singularly informed leaders from throughout the library industry.
DART-Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortia who are working together to improve global access to European research theses. DART-Europe is endorsed by LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche), and it is the European Working Group of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). The DART-Europe partners help to provide researchers with a single European Portal for the discovery of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), and they participate in advocacy to influence future European e-theses developments.
This annual report includes a summary of the activities of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), during the 2018–2019 year, and plans for the future.
The Library of Congress Labs team is co-hosting a workshop to kick-off international collaborations around digital scholarship. Partners in the UK and the US are coming together to collaborate on the role of digital scholarship in transforming museums and other cultural institutions such as libraries, archives, and galleries. They will aim to achieve this by transforming the ways in which culture and heritage can be experienced by global audiences; developing new directions for organisational leadership and new forms of curatorial practice; opening new research frontiers and questions; and advancing collections-based research methods for the 21st century.
A generation of researchers and librarians will have grown up with COPAC (Consortium of Online Public Access Catalogues), the union catalogue for research libraries in the UK and Ireland. Since 1st August 2019, COPAC has been replaced by JISC Library Hub Discover. Library Hub Discover currently contains over 39 million records contributed by 110 institutions across the UK and Ireland. The holdings include books, journal titles, grey literature, and also maps which you can locate using the advanced search. Contributing libraries include national libraries, higher education libraries and some specialist libraries.
