DART-Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortia who are working together to improve global access to European research theses. DART-Europe is endorsed by LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche), and it is the European Working Group of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). The DART-Europe partners help to provide researchers with a single European Portal for the discovery of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), and they participate in advocacy to influence future European e-theses developments.

This annual report includes a summary of the activities of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), during the 2018–2019 year, and plans for the future.

The Library of Congress Labs team is co-hosting a workshop to kick-off international collaborations around digital scholarship. Partners in the UK and the US are coming together to collaborate on the role of digital scholarship in transforming museums and other cultural institutions such as libraries, archives, and galleries. They will aim to achieve this by transforming the ways in which culture and heritage can be experienced by global audiences; developing new directions for organisational leadership and new forms of curatorial practice; opening new research frontiers and questions; and advancing collections-based research methods for the 21st century.

A generation of researchers and librarians will have grown up with COPAC (Consortium of Online Public Access Catalogues), the union catalogue for research libraries in the UK and Ireland. Since 1st August 2019, COPAC has been replaced by JISC Library Hub Discover. Library Hub Discover currently contains over 39 million records contributed by 110 institutions across the UK and Ireland. The holdings include books, journal titles, grey literature, and also maps which you can locate using the advanced search. Contributing libraries include national libraries, higher education libraries and some specialist libraries.

Manually indexing documents for subject-based access is a labour-intensive process. This paper describes Annif, an open source tool and microservice for automated subject indexing developed by the National Library of Finland. After training it with a subject vocabulary and existing metadata gathered from bibliographic databases, Annif can be used to assign subject headings for new documents. The current version is based on a combination of existing natural language processing and machine learning tools.

The recording from the IFLA ARL Webinar, Academic Libraries Engaging in Publishing: a Burgeoning Service Model in the Open Access Sphere, presented by Jody Bailey, Head of Scholarly Communications Office, Emory University Libraries, and Ted Polley, Social Sciences & Digital Publishing, IUPUI University Library, is now available from here:

Recording

Slides

If you could not attend LIBER Annual Conference 2019 held in Dublin, 26-28 June 2019, there are two places to watch the live stream: on this website, or on YouTube. You can find the presentations on Zenodo and on LIBER Conference website.

CollEx-Persée is a research infrastructure set up in France in 2017. It brings together 19 research libraries, 4 national operators and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It aims to facilitate access to and use of library hybrid collections by researchers.  This communication presents the strategy for creating CollEx-Persée and the breakthroughs introduced by this new system, then its organization, networking activities and first achievements. Calls for projects have made a very concrete contribution to bringing librarians and researchers closer together. Finally, the emerging challenges are presented, in particular the management of change within libraries and training for new professions.

The breadth of the profession was embraced by keynote speakers and breakout sessions at CILIP Conference 2019. CILIP is the UK’s library and information association. Topics covered on day one ranged from artificial intelligence to public libraries. This report highlights the best sessions.

This report is based on a Europe-wide survey run by LIBER’s Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group. The survey focused on digital collections and the activities libraries undertake around them. The themes covered were based on input from participants at the Digital Humanities and Digital Cultural Heritage workshop at LIBER’s 2018 Annual Conference (Lille, France; 4-6 July).  The final survey consisted of 83 questions and was open for responses between 1 February and 15 March 2019.