Bridging the gap between research and practice communities is more pertinent than ever because of the need for evidence in developing and evaluating library services and programs. The issues range from limited transfer of ideas from research into practice to a lack of education in research methods for library practitioners. This book introduces new voices from international research and practice communities into the discussion and contributes to the debate about the research-practice divide. Education and continuing training in research methods from international perspectives are explored and the experiences of researcher-practitioners from several countries highlight the issues.

Over three days, IFLA’s Governing Board met for its first in-person meeting since Rotterdam, in a week that marked 100 days since it took office. The meeting was an opportunity not just to look back at what had been achieved, but also to advance key projects, opening the way to further delivery in 2024.

David R. Lankes, Professor of Librarianship at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses the role that libraries and information professionals have in supporting appropriate use of artificial intelligence and tools such as ChatGPT. Included in the article is this useful LibGuide created by library staff at Northwestern University on the use of AI tools in faculty research.

To help libraries explore how to respond to these challenges, OCLC and LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) have launched a multi-year engagement program based on LIBER’s 2023-2027 strategy, which presents a vision for the future of research libraries. The series is called Building for the future, and this year it focuses on state-of-the-art services.

The series will include facilitated discussions on three relevant topics:

• Research data management (register today!)
• Data-driven decision making
• AI, machine learning, and data science.

Read the summary of the opening plenary.

The proceedings of IFLA Academic and Research Libraries (ARL) Section’s latest Webinar Series iteration (11 October 2023) titled Open science policies and best practices in academic and research libraries are now available.

Programme and background to the webinar is also available.

The Libraries of the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) University Network (AUNILO), serves as a platform for discussing strategies and sharing experiences in navigating the evolving landscape of education. The 18^th AUNILO Meeting, which took place in August 2023, gathered a wide range of participating countries. The theme for the meeting was Co-Creating the Future of Libraries: Empowering Academic Librarians for Innovation and Impact.

This meeting brought to light the resilience, innovation and collaboration that defines academic libraries across the ASEAN member universities. It served as a testament to the continuous commitment of academic librarians in embracing change, promoting collaboration, and advancing their institutions’ academic goals.

Since 2012, the German National Library has been collecting websites in addition to e-books, printed works and much more. Of course, these are stored digitally in DNB’s web archive. A snapshot of the website is created at a specified time using a crawler and recorded in the DNB catalog. However, this journey of discovery is largely limited to the DNB’s premises in Leipzig or Frankfurt am Main – for copyright reasons. The DNB is not only active through cooperation at the regional level, they also work on web archiving in the international context as a representative of Germany.

At this year’s annual celebration in San Francisco, the Internet Archive team showcased its innovative projects and rallied supporters around its mission of “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”

Watch the full live stream of the celebration to learn how the Internet Archive is using AI to build new capabilities into libraries, and how students and scholars all over the world use the Archive’s’ petabytes of data to inform their own research.

La Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg (BnL) se lance dans l’intelligence artificielle et vient de signer un partenariat avec ChatGPT. Le robot conversationnel développé par OpenAI permet aujourd’hui à ses usagers d’explorer ses archives numérisées.  Capable de comprendre le français, l’allemand et l’anglais, il donne des réponses précises et argumentées sur des articles de presse historiques.

Pour en savoir plus, consultez le dossier de presse.

The IFLA Statement on Libraries and artificial intelligence (AI) issued in 2020 outlined key considerations and recommendations for the use of AI technologies in the library sector. IFLA Artificial Intelligence Special Interest Group produced in June 2023 a reference document seeking to provide a useful non-technical resource for information library and information professionals. The members of the group try to point to authoritative sources which are open to all. After an introduction with definitions of generative artificial intelligence, they highlight ethical and information issues and various uses for information professionals as well as for end users.