The Library of Congress and the National Archives announced their agencies have joined the PDF Association, which promotes adoption of international standards for portable document format technology, as partner organizations. Both federal agencies collect, and produce, numerous documents as PDFs.

“The Library’s participation will foster enhanced relationships with industry, providing more opportunities for the Library to communicate its needs to the community that develops the software which content producers and publishers use for digital documents and more,” said Mark Sweeney, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress.

Fifty HathiTrust member libraries have proposed to retain more than 16 million volumes for 25 years under the HathiTrust Shared Print Program. These volumes correspond to more than 4.8 million individual book titles held in the HathiTrust Digital Library (about 65% of all HathiTrust digital monographs). This is a significant step toward the primary goal of the program: to ensure that print copies of all HathiTrust digital holdings remain available to scholars for many years to come. The Shared Print Program is a core program of HathiTrust, supported by and benefiting all of the 120 HathiTrust members.

John Tuck, Royal Holloway University Library and head of LIBER’s Working Group on Leadership and Workforce Development, is reporting on the latest LIBER Journées. This is a key initiative for LIBER, and it is part of a broader leadership development programme for librarians. Highlights of the training programme held at Sciences Po Paris in May 2017 can be seen in this video.

The United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library (DHL) and IFLA held side event titled : 2030 Vision: How Libraries Support the UN’s Work on Sustainable Development during the High Level Political Forum in New York. In the context of the official launch of the Development and Access to Information report on 17 July, this event was an opportunity to celebrate the role of libraries in delivering access to information at the global level. It underlined the importance of collaboration between libraries to build a global knowledge society. That is why laws, regulations, investments, infrastructure and librairies will need to coordinate themselves.

NASIG held its annual conference in Indianapolis June 8-11 2017. The conference theme was Racing to the Crossroads. Presenters positioned their talks around what librarians are racing toward and which crossroads concern them. Sessions covered include topics about identifying core competencies for e-resource librarians and breakout sessions on the nuts and bolts of collection assessment.

This article describes the results of a systematic review of peer-reviewed, published research articles about discovery layers, i.e. user-friendly interfaces or systems that provide single-search box access to library content. Focusing on articles in LISTA published 2009–2013, a set of 80 articles was coded for community of users, journal type, research method, and results. This study demonstrates that the scholarly communications surrounding discovery systems or layers are evolving, moving from technologists to a converging of general responsibilities and concerns, but with a pronounced focus on academic institutions. Nevertheless, there is little research published uniquely about public library users, more specifically about how discovery layers affect public libraries or children.

DIVE+ has been awarded the Grand Prize at the LODLAM Summit, held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in June 2017. The summit brought together a hundred of experts in the community of Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums. DIVE+ is an event-centric linked data digital collection browser aimed to provide an integrated and interactive access to multimedia objects from various heterogeneous online collections. It enriches the structured metadata of online collections with linked open data vocabularies with focus on events, people, locations and concepts that are depicted or associated with particular collection objects. DIVE+ presentation is online.

KB+ is promoting an international initiative from non-commercial knowledge bases through an open letter. In order for libraries to have a good set of metadata and to optimise the functionalities of the systems in use at the libraries, KB+, together with ERDB-JP (Japan), ABES-BACON (France) and Bibsam, have published an Open Letter to System Vendors. The objective is to encourage a constructive dialogue to be able to maximise the impact of the metadata provided.

The IFLA IAP is a capacity-building programme designed to promote and support the role libraries can play in  planning and implementating the United Nations 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The IAP Update – May 2017 features activities and plans reported by IAP participants between February 2017 and the end of May 2017. The document’s structure mirrors the four regions (Africa, Asia Oceania, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean) where the six IFLA IAP Regional Workshops have taken place.

This issue makes clear that IFLA Journal continues to mirror the overarching dialogues within the profession through the publication of research that represents widely held research problems within the profession and a diversity of scholars working to identify and develop applied solutions to issues that range from indigenous knowledge, digitization services, assessment, and the overall value of libraries and knowledge access to societies.