A team of Penn Libraries staff has been analyzing an accumulated history of periodicals in the collection—journals, magazines, newspapers, academic journals, comic books—to determine which are no longer restricted by copyright and are therefore available for free and unrestricted use. The Penn Libraries have more than 8.6 million volumes. Many of them did not maintain their copyrights but need to be researched to confirm that. All told, the Deep Backfile project is researching more than 10,000 such serials.

KBR – the National Library of Belgium – has announced an ambitious new project entitled LOD-ISNI – Linked Open Data and ISNI – as a crucial bridge identifier for cultural heritage that will set the foundations for an international network of LOD and ISNI users. It will explore novel uses of, and the advantages to be gained from, LOD/ISNI information exchanges. The international project team includes partner organizations ISNI-IA, major national libraries, OCLC plus Belgian Universities. Find out more about this project in your preferred language here: English, Dutch, French.

On December 9, 2020, the Library for Foreign Literature and the Russian State Library (RSL), with the support of the Russian Library Association and  the IFLA Russian-Language Center at the RSL, held an online round table Russian Libraries at IFLA: New Forms of Engagement. The main goal was to raise awareness of the Russian library community about changes in the IFLA governance structure, the content of amendments proposed to be introduced into the IFLA Charter, the results of the IFLA General Assembly held in November 2020, and the strategic tasks until 2024.

On 26 January 2021, Prime Minister of the Russian Federation Mikhail Mishustin signed an order, transferring the duties of the Russian Book Chamber to the Russian State Library. The decision should advance the implementation of government initiatives, proposed by the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and other agencies, aimed at the development of literacy and literature. The merger of workflows, technologies, and best practices will eliminate duplication of efforts in such areas as cataloguing, accounting, and storage, streamline the digital transformation of the legal deposit system, reduce costs for publishers, and ultimately, improve compliance with the legal deposit regulations.

Two librarians from the Latin American and Iberian Collections team at Cambridge University Library have tackled problems related to Open Access books’ metadata and accessibility. From a particular case regarding work publications by CLACSO (Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, a network of 700 research institutions from 52 countries), this article points out the challenges that librarians encounter when dealing with Open Access books with poor bibliographic description. Nearly 200 CLACSO records were updated and enriched, which led to discuss the broader issues and challenges that poor-quality metadata for Open Access books imply.

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) members released their journal subscription cost data for collections and packages negotiated by Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), as part of their commitment to greater transparency of licensing information. The current release, which is accessible via the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR), covers subscription costs for 2019-2020.

Research libraries are faced with a pressing demand to assess the value of their services and evidence their impact. In order to develop a better understanding of how research libraries respond to this demand, the authors collected and analysed case-study and survey data from across the RLUK membership. The authors present some of the key findings, showing the pathways to impact, and reflect on the opportunities and challenges that the digital era presents for increasing and measuring this impact.

Casalini Libri joins forces with its historic partner @Cult, a software house based in Rome and specializing in the design and development of solutions for information management and knowledge sharing. The union both strengthens and furthers the Casalini mission to promote the dissemination of culture through increasingly advanced services to libraries, institutions and publishers. They both promote Share-VDE, a collaborative endeavour and a library-driven initiative. This prototype platform for searching and accessing bibliographic resources according to the BIBFRAME data model brings together the bibliographic catalogues and authority files of a community of libraries in a shared discovery environment based on linked data.

This book addresses multiple aspects of how public and academic libraries can deal with the increase in self-published titles.

The latest IFLA Asia and Oceania Regional Quarterly Newsletter is out. You will know what is trending in the Asia and Oceania region. But also,  discussions have taken place about the current situations affecting libraries, and about unprecedented changes that are reshaping the library communities.

Please open the PDF newsletter to access the links.