Advocate General Jääskinen proposes to the Court of Justice of the European Union his point of view and a legal solution about copyright and digitised books in libraries. According to him, a Member State may authorise libraries to digitise, without the consent of the rightholders, books they hold in their collection so as to make them available at electronic reading points.
During the Europeana Aggregator Forum (The Hague, 22-23 May), Deputy Director Harry Verwayen has given an overview of the strategic plan and ambitions of the Europeana Foundation going forward to 2020.
ABES – the French bibliographic agency for Higher Education – has published a study on developments in shared cataloguing systems. The report discusses ten case studies of shared cataloguing systems and describes scenarios for the French national catalogue SUDOC.
On May 21, NISO, the National Information Standards Organization, and the North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) co-sponsored a webinar intended to help more “effectively understand and apply usage data”.
The 90-minute webinar provided an opportunity to learn more about current best practices and standards.
IFLA, along with the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and the Technology and Social Change Group (TASCHA) at the University of Washington have prepared a briefing paper which draws UN Member States’ attention to the importance of access to ICTs as a key issue in development and to the ongoing digital divide.
Data.bnf.fr is an open data project launched in July 2011 based on semantic web standards and tools. Agnès Simon, its Product Manager, talks about the problems encountered, the solutions found and tells us more about this project’s goals.
EBSCO Information Services announced a new policy on metadata sharing that will make all metadata for 129 of its full-text databases, more than 550,000 ebooks and more than 70 historical digital archives available to third-party discovery services.
Many professors and students gravitate to Google as a gateway to research. Libraries want to offer them a comparably simple and broad experience for searching academic content. As a result, a major change is under way in how libraries organise information.
A draft version of the European Commission’s impact assessment on copyright reform is circulating online. Whilst the final report is to be published, Paul Keller, Vice Chair of Kennisland shares his thoughts on this crucial document.
The European Union has blocked the discussions at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright & Related Rights (SCCR). The libraries and archives organisations present at the 27th meeting of the SCCR have put on a joint press release, expressing their frustration and disappointment with the EU, and rallying European libraries and archives to reach out to their policy makers asking the EU to take a more nuanced approach to the discussions.
