LIBER’s 47th Annual Conference in Lille, France brought 440 research library professionals together for a week of discussions focused on doing more with Open Science, and on related topics such as metrics, research data management and copyright reform.

• Presentations are on the conference website and in LIBER’s Zenodo group,
• Photos are on LIBER’s Flickr account,
• Live stream recordings are being added to the University of Lille website.

The conference highlights are presented in this post.

The National Diet Library (NDL), which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, has recently released the “National Diet Library bibliographic data creation / provision plan 2018-2020” (PDF: 386 KB). After introducing the background and the outline, the purpose of the “bibliographic plan 2020” is detailed. Among the most important tasks of the plan, one is to define how to implement new Japanese cataloging rules, and enhance access to digitized materials published within the National Diet Library Digital Collection, notably the Journal article index.

The IFLA Trend Report identifies five high level trends shaping the information society, spanning access to education, privacy, civic engagement and transformation. Its findings reflect a year’s consultation with a range of experts and stakeholders from different disciplines to map broader societal changes occurring, or likely to occur in the information environment. The IFLA Trend 2018 Update brings in four more expert perspectives and is the latest follow-up of the library community’s discussions on the Trend Report.

The  updated 2018–19 edition of the statement titled Recommended Formats Statement released by the Library of Congress identifies hierarchies of the physical and technical characteristics of creative formats, both analog and digital, which maximize the chances for survival and continued accessibility of creative content into the future. This report emphasizes the benefit of electronic delivery of datasets, to reflect the reality of acquiring and managing digital content in modern workflows.

Two OCLC librarians consider the future of the academic library in the context of a diversifying higher education system. The academic library is adapting to the changing research and learning behaviors of its home institution, which are the principal drivers of the library service. The authors explore ways in which libraries are responding to the transition from a collections-based model to a more diffuse services-based model. The model of excellence for libraries will need to be plural, based on strategic fit to the needs of the institution they serve and not on collection size or gate count.

The June issue contains notably an article about the Library of Congress’s BIBFRAME development process (see pp. 15-18) and a report about the 28th Meeting of the Permanent UNIMARC Committee that held in Rome in March 2018 (pp. 41-45).

Cariniana Network is a distributed digital preservation network, funded by the Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia IBICT. Cariniana is responsible for the insertion and storage of 772 open access electronic journals on the LOCKSS platform. The network offers digital preservation services as well as mechanisms in order to facilitate the automation of identification processes, storage, validation and conversion of the content into new digital formats.
Miguel Ángel Márdero Arellano, Cariniana Network Coordinator, and Alexandre Faria de Oliveira, IT Coordinator, both work for IBICT. They will present the Cariniana Network project at IFLA Session 160 Planning digital preservation: in for the long run – Preservation and Conservation with Information Technology (SI). 

Each year, IFLA Headquarters compiles its Annual Report which provides a comprehensive overview on its activities throughout the preceding year. The report gives IFLA Members and other interested parties full and transparent details on activities, achievements and financial performance.

Download the full report.

IFLA is encouraging the library community across the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region to share their views on a draft declaration on libraries, access to information and development. This is the result of a close collaboration between IFLA and the Hernán Santa Cruz Library of the UN Economic Commission for LAC, and it aims to send a strong, unified message to ministers in 2019.

The AGROVOC thesaurus was first published (in English, Spanish and French) at the beginning of the 1980s by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. In 2000, AGROVOC went digital through a relational database; in 2009, it became a SKOS resource. AGROVOC is now available as a SKOS-XL concept scheme, also published as a Linked Open Data (LOD) set composed of 35,000+ concepts available in up to 29 languages. By means of LOD, AGROVOC is aligned to 18 open datasets related to agriculture.