These guidelines address the specific needs related to planning digitization projects for rare and special collections.

At the World Library and Information Congress (WLIC) in Lyon this summer, the UNESCO session was spent on the problem of selection in digital heritage. It is one of the challenging subjects within the PERSIST project, an initiative of UNESCO, ICA, IFLA and other partners, that tries to enhance the sustainability of digital heritage.

The majority of the metadata in the German Union Catalogue of Serials (ZDB) have been available under “Creative Commons Zero (CC0 1.0)” conditions since June 2014. This means that roughly 1.7 million bibliographic data in all languages and with no time restrictions have been approved for further use along with more than 13 million library ownership data. The approval explicitly includes commercial use.

FOSTER (Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research) is a 2-year, EU-Funded (FP7) project, carried out by 13 partners across 8 countries. The primary aim is to produce a European-wide training programme that will help researchers, postgraduate students, librarians and other stakeholders to incorporate Open Access approaches into their existing research methodologies.

Speakers from the FOSTER consortium ran four half-day workshops in Brussels at the end of June. The courses were for project officers at the European Commission. A summary of the key points as well as the presentations’ slides are now available.

IFLA 2014 Pre-Conference satellite meeting, held in Geneva on 13-14th August, focused on the transformation aspects of both, digitized as well as born digital news media. The main theme was: “Digital Transformation and the Changing Role of News Media in the 21st Century”. All aspects of digital preservation were discussed, both from the publishers and the librarians points of views. From research data management issues to partnerships in digitisation projects, keynotes speakers have explored the challenges faced and the lessons learned from all the digitisation steps. Several case studies enabled to confront best practices and procedures, revisited with new technological advances like data and text mining, OCR and named entities recognition. A special focus has been put on e-legal deposit and newsgames as an emerging genre. At last, have been discussed how digitized news media change the approach of reading and exploring the news, for public library patrons as well as researchers in digital humanities.

http://www.itu.int/en/history/Pages/IFLA2014.aspx

The Newspapers Section open session was held in Lyon on the theme “All we need is news – knowledge production and dissemination through news media”. The keynotes speakers highlighted the consequences of digital technology in news creation, production, and dissemination as well as on the post-dissemination fate of news such as preservation of digital and hard assets, collection management, storage of physical and digital content, access and use of digital and physical news collections, and similar fates. Through the case studies and projects presented by several national libraries, practices of semantic web technologies, web harvesting and e-legal deposit management were developed.

http://conference.ifla.org/ifla80/node/388

The 13th ABES Days were held in Montpellier, France, 20-21 May 2014. Among the broached topics: the Agency’s evolution, bibliographic standards, interoperability and data mining.

The presentations’ supports and the videos are now available online (in French).

ABES (Agence bibliographique de l’enseignement supérieur / Higher Education Bibliographic Agency) is a public agency which creates and manages information-based tools and services for the University and Research communities within the framework of French national strategy.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) hosted an IFLA 2014 satellite meeting devoted to linked data on 14th August 2014. This one-day event was the opportunity to present actual realizations and practical issues such as the maintenance of systems based on linked data.

Most of the presentations’ supports are now available online (in English), and Emmanuelle Bermès’ insights (BnF/French National Library) are accessible here.

At the 80th IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) World Library and Information Congress on Aug. 18, 2014, in Lyon, France, IFLA introduced the Lyon Declaration on Access to Information. It calls upon member states of the United Nations (UN) to make an international commitment to use the post-2015 development agenda—intended to succeed the UN’s expiring Millennium Development Goals—to ensure that everyone has access to information. Moreover, it notes that access to information must be coupled with the ability to understand, use, and share information.

The Hiberlink project investigates how web links in online scientific and other academic articles fail to lead to the resources that were originally referenced.

In this presentation, Peter Burnhill of EDINA, University of Edinburgh, outlines how the Hiberlink project aims to address the problem of dead links in eTheses.

A new updated version has been published. This guide is an internal audit tool dedicated to enhance the quality of open access academic institutional repositories. It will contribute to enhance the scope and visibility of repositories among the scientific community, and establish the rules to be observed to create a robust and visible infrastructure.

Guía RECOLECTA para la Evaluación de Repositorios Institucionales de Investigación