OCLC has been awarded a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a shared “Entity Management Infrastructure” that will support linked data management initiatives underway in the library and scholarly communications community. When complete, this infrastructure will be jointly curated by the community and OCLC, and will ultimately make scholarly materials more connected and discoverable on the web. OCLC will publish URIs and metadata for the entities via the web, and will provide methods for library staff to edit, enrich and add to this set of entities.

Using tools for the statistical analysis of national data on Shared Conservation Plans for Periodicals, Abes, the French Bibliographic Agency of Higher Education, has carried out this quantitative and qualitative state of the art study for the main purpose of managers, but also for library professionals, whether or not involved in projects of this type. The study highlights 36 Shared Conservation Plans for Periodicals, either thematic or regional. The study focuses on the analysis of the quality of bibliographic and holdings, underlining the importance of having records from the ISSN Registry managed by ISSN International Centre, if possible enriched by the cataloguing work specific to the Sudoc, the French union catalogue produced by higher education and research libraries and documentation centres.

Article in French

IFLA has published the 2019 Update of its Trend Report. As the latest in a series looking at the key issues and developments that shape the world in which libraries operate, it offers a basis for reflection and long-term thinking in the field. The IFLA Trend Report is the result of the dialogue between the library field and experts from a range of disciplines. You can download the document.

The Trend Report website offers a range of data and  information for libraries to use, share and build on.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has opened 2020 registration for LibQUAL+®, a leading library customer satisfaction assessment tool. For the past 20 years, libraries have depended on LibQUAL+ survey data to evaluate the needs and satisfaction levels of their users. With LibQUAL+, libraries are able to access raw data and comments to identify priorities, successes, and concerns. Since 2000, LibQUAL+ has been utilized by 1,390 libraries in 35 countries. It has helped libraries gather over 2.8 million responses, with 37% of respondents providing additional comments.

The Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section (SOCRS) and IFLA Committee on Standards have issued a call for papers for IFLA WLIC 2020. More information available at https://2020.ifla.org/conference-programme/calls-for-papers/ .

In the past few years, the National Library of Finland has been developing its subject authorities towards a more easily reusable linked data format. Old string-based monolingual thesauri have been transformed into multilingual machine readable indexing “ontologies”, and a new linked data vocabulary service called Finto has been set up for the dissemination of the new type of vocabularies. A culmination point in this development was reached in the summer of 2019, when the production of subject authorities was permanently moved away from the library databases into a completely linked data based environment. In the process all old bibliographic records with subject indexing in the Finnish Libraries’ Union Catalog were converted to host the new form of concepts.

With 2020 just around the corner, the achievements of this year are reflected with a highlight on what will be delivered in the months ahead.

In the face of evolving user needs, many academic libraries are reimagining the services they offer. As instruction moves online, how can libraries best provide support for teaching and learning? As research becomes more reliant on data, computation, and collaboration, where can libraries best add value? As colleges welcome more diverse student populations and greater contingent faculty labor to campus, what is the library’s role? As budgets shrink, how should a library prioritize which resources and services to provide?

The Charleston Conference and Against the Grain released an initial selection from the 2019 Charleston Conference “Views from the Penthouse Suite” video interviews. Another set of interviews was released, featuring a number of singularly informed leaders from throughout the library industry.