The DARIAH Beyond Europe (DBE) event, held on 2-4 October 2018 at the Library of Congress (LoC), was a workshop dedicated to international cooperation and knowledge exchange. It brought together digital humanists from the US East coast and Europe to exchange ideas and discuss the state of play in the two continents. The Horizon 2020 funded project, NewsEye, was presented as well as the LoC funded National Digital Newspaper Program.

Open access to digital research output is increasing, but academic library policies can place restrictions on public access to collections. This paper reports on a preliminary study to investigate the correlation between academic library access policies and institutional positions of openness to knowledge. The results show that academic library policies may suggest open public access, but multi-layered user categories, privileges and fees charged can inhibit access, with disparities in openness emerging between library policies and institutional open access policies.

At the IFLA Governing Board meetings held in mid-December 2018, further important steps have been undertaken. Board members, representing all library types and regions, explored how the evidence produced by the Global Vision can be turned into a strategic plan. For the next World Library and Information Congress, a strategic plan will be launched for IFLA as a whole, as well as action plans for all Professional Units.

In October 2018, Ithaka S+R published a brief, The State of Digital Preservation in 2018: A Snapshot of Challenges and Gaps, which is based on interviews with 21 experts to survey their perspectives on the state of digital preservation. The brief highlights some assessment- and metric-related matters as it is becoming more complicated to articulate what success entails in digital preservation. One of the areas highlighted in the report is the difficulty in preserving the outcomes, methodologies, and context of such engagements. Ithaka S+R is looking forward to hearing reactions to the brief to carve out a research agenda through the wisdom of the community.

Digital preservation service Portico recently completed a two-year project to rebuild its preservation infrastructure from the ground up with the support of its publisher and library participants. This initiative helped create a stable, scalable, elastic architecture that will enable Portico to keep pace with the ever-increasing amount of content. It will also allow them to provide preservation for new and complex forms of scholarly publishing. Portico’s Managing Director gives an insight into the infancy of the service, and in the two-year project to rebuild that infrastructure.

Andrew K. Pace, OCLC Executive Director, is convinced that libraries need linked data platforms. It is one of the last chances to embark on innovations that are not possible with the increasingly arcane and anachronistic MARC record. He explains what linked data cataloging means for library workers and end users, and gives an insight into the OCLC Research linked data Wikibase prototype, built to reconcile data between legacy bibliographic information and linked data entities.

This article written by Jean-Didier Wagneur, librarian at the National Library of France, is a summary of an article published in French on Gallica blog in January 2018. The author gives a historical account of literary works published in the press throughout the 19th century.

Researchers, librarians, and publishers look to CLOCKSS and other long-term archives to guarantee that the scholarly record will remain intact. CLOCKSS is taking steps to formalize its Succession Plan and ensure the enduring survival of the scholarly content it preserves. Four of CLOCKSS’s twelve library nodes have agreed to continue to preserve the digital content that is preserved in CLOCKSS, if the organization were to cease to exist. The CLOCKSS Succession Plan is part of its Trusted Repository Audit Checklist (TRAC) certification by the Center for Research Libraries.

New opportunities for libraries are highlighted by analysing the roles they could potentially play in citizen science projects. Citizen science is one of the eight pillars of open science identified by the Open Science Policy Platform, an EC Working Group. Several of these roles are illustrated in case studies from institutions where citizen science has already been embraced: University College London, the University of Barcelona, the University of Southern Denmark and Qatar National Library. A snapshot of what libraries have so far achieved in this sphere is presented, as well as the remaining challenges and opportunities.

ABES, the French Bibliographic Agency of Higher Education, has recently issued its 2018-2022 organisation project. ABES new strategic project aims to overhaul the agency’s tools and to enhance relationships with its networks. The ISSN International Centre is mentioned as one of ABES’ main partners in cooperation activities at the national and international levels. ABES actions aim to foster the integration of the identifiers produced by ABES into national and international standards.