The self-publishing explosion and availability of self-publishing tools and services geared to libraries have heralded new opportunities for libraries, especially public libraries, to engage their communities in new ways. By supporting self-publishing initiatives in their communities, public libraries can promote standards of quality in self-publishing, provide unique opportunities to engage underserved populations, and become true archives of their communities.

The Scholarly Communication Librarian Core Competencies Task Force has completed a board-reviewed draft of core competencies. The Task Force intends to present its findings at the Members Forum on June 10th during the upcoming annual conference. All NASIG Conference attendees are welcome to offer comments. Through extensive investigation into recent position descriptions and continuing education opportunities, the task force identified four themes common to all scholarly communication librarians.

The Library of Congress is making 25 million records in its online catalog available for free bulk download at loc.gov/cds/products/marcDist.php. All those records use the MARC format, known to be a reliable international standard, and cover more than 45 years, ranging from 1968, during the early years of MARC, to 2014.

On May 8, 2017, several regional and national repository networks and stakeholder groups, including the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), formally endorsed an international accord that will lead to the greater alignment of repository networks around the world. The accord was developed by COAR, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, and aims to support open access and open science. It will foster closer relationships between the regional networks and act as a framework for undertaking specific activities and implementation of common functionalities.

OCLC and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Library are working together to make it easy for editors to link citations in Wikipedia to millions of library materials represented in WorldCat, the world’s largest database of information about library collections.

Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress (USA), member of IFLA Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section), reports on the CONSER Open Access Journal Project. This project cooperatively targets the DOAJ to assure that CONSER records are available for all journals in the DOAJ. It is designed to provide on-going coverage of new titles added to DOAJ. These CONSER records are in turn used by electronic resource management and access systems to track e-journal collections such as DOAJ and other e-journal collections. Ensuring accurate ISSN data is distributed for more consistent accessibility, and providing a consistent set of titles and metadata across different user information environments are among the benefits of this initiative.

OCLC Research and Ithaka S+R have studied and written extensively about the evolution of higher education and the implications of this evolution for the organizational structure and services of libraries. Today, they are announcing a new project, University Futures; Library Futures, in which OCLC Research and Ithaka S+R are joining forces to carry out a collaborative project on the future of academic libraries, in the context of changes in the higher education landscape.

This paper, presented at ACRL 2017, addresses a number of faculty concerns pertaining to “predatory publishers” and the institutional repository. The aim is to discuss in which ways librarians can educate faculty and graduate students to help them in navigating such issues as open access, institutional repositories, and determining the quality of potential outlets for publication.

This study examines ETDs deposited during the period 2011-2015 in an institutional repository, to determine the degree to which the documents suffer from reference rot. The authors converted and examined 664 doctoral dissertations in total. The results serve to emphasize not only the necessity of broader awareness of this problem, but also to stimulate action on the preservation front.

IFLA Library Map of the World is a representative source of basic library statistics and a robust tool for providing a worldwide comparison of different library  performance metrics, mapped by country level data. In March 2017, IFLA launched the Library Map of the World 2017 Survey to collect a basic set of library performance metrics from as many countries as possible and to make a visualisation of the data for all to use. The data visualisation website will be launched at IFLA WLIC 2017 in Wrocław, Poland in August 2017