Germany’s DEAL project, which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier’s academic and scientific journals, effective January 1, 2017. The boycott is in response to interrupted negociations about a nationwide licence agreement and Elsevier’s refusal to adopt “transparent business models” to “make publications more openly accessible.”

A report detailing the rise of the Google search among young academics has prompted debate about the future of libraries. This research, funded by the Publishing Research Consortium, looks at the attitudes to publishing of early career academics and suggests that libraries have “little to offer” to the next generation of academics.

Digital technologies have allowed for a richer, more diverse production of ideas and expressions than ever before. However, they also bring challenges as regards the preservation of cultural heritage. As part of the Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch) report 2016, focusing on economic, social and cultural rights and the Internet, IFLA has contributed an article setting out the issues from the library perspective.

The British Library makes its data available to researchers and other libraries free of charge in a variety of formats and access mechanisms: MARC21 via Z39.50, basic RDF/XML, Linked Open Data and Researcher Format (.csv). They are now seeking feedback on these free data services.

The Subject Analysis and Access IFLA section Annual report, 2016 outlines the Section’s progress and activities for the first semester.

IFLA Subject Analysis and Accesss Section new  Action plan 2016-2017 outlines the key objectives for IFLA Section in the upcoming year and which are their projects to reach those goals.

A core concept of the National Digital Platform for Libraries and Museums is that shared digital services and tools can enable libraries and archives across the country to better leverage their resources and meet the needs of their users. Three of the recently announced National Leadership Grants for Libraries projects exemplify how these connective efforts are making an impact. Noticeably, the third grant deals with distributed preservation and descriptive metadata approaches for repositories.

How is the changing nature of research in digital environments reshaping the nature of library collections and services in academic and research libraries? Two central directions are given, each a response to the centrality of the user in a network environment. First, the library has an increasing role in managing the research and other outputs of the university (the inside-out collection). Second, the library is facilitating access to a broader range of local, external and collaborative resources organized around user needs (the facilitated collection).

The Open Library Foundation promotes opoen source projects for libraries.

The first project of the Fondation is FOLIO (the Future of Libraries is Open), which is a a community-based collaboration making open source technology available to all libraries. The project aims at developing an open source Library Services Platform (LSP) designed for innovation.

LIBER’s mission and key elements of the work accomplished are currently featured in the latest edition of Signum, a journal published by the Finnish Research Library Association, further to the 2016 LIBER annual conference held in Helsinki.