More than 500 speakers and 3100 delegates from 122 countries, not to mention 247sessions covering all aspects of the profession, makes IFLA’s World Library and Information Congress (WLIC) a unique experience of professional development and networking for librarians and information specialists. A summary of the most important events of this congress is now available.
Collections and collaboration, digital scholarship, the publishing revolution and the new dimensions of service to scholars and students are on the agenda.
The Library of Congress has announced the release of the 2017-2018 Recommended Formats Statement.
The goal of the Recommended Formats has always been to provide useful information furthering the shared goal of ensuring the preservation of and long-term access to creative works. By providing up-to-date information about the file types, physical and technical characteristics and associated metadata which support these goals, the Statement hopes to provide the building blocks upon which libraries can build their collections, now and for the future.
During WLIC 2017 in Wroclaw, Poland, IFLA launched a worldwide consultation about its global strategy. This strategy is the result of a series of workshops held on different continents which have focused on how to strengthen the ties within the library field, help identify future challenges and opportunities for the library field, and prioritize actions that the library environment could take in response to the fast-pacing changes in societies. In order to make the participation in the discussion easier, an online voting platform based on the outcomes of the regional meetings is available.
The Library of Congress and the National Archives announced their agencies have joined the PDF Association, which promotes adoption of international standards for portable document format technology, as partner organizations. Both federal agencies collect, and produce, numerous documents as PDFs.
“The Library’s participation will foster enhanced relationships with industry, providing more opportunities for the Library to communicate its needs to the community that develops the software which content producers and publishers use for digital documents and more,” said Mark Sweeney, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress.
Fifty HathiTrust member libraries have proposed to retain more than 16 million volumes for 25 years under the HathiTrust Shared Print Program. These volumes correspond to more than 4.8 million individual book titles held in the HathiTrust Digital Library (about 65% of all HathiTrust digital monographs). This is a significant step toward the primary goal of the program: to ensure that print copies of all HathiTrust digital holdings remain available to scholars for many years to come. The Shared Print Program is a core program of HathiTrust, supported by and benefiting all of the 120 HathiTrust members.
John Tuck, Royal Holloway University Library and head of LIBER’s Working Group on Leadership and Workforce Development, is reporting on the latest LIBER Journées. This is a key initiative for LIBER, and it is part of a broader leadership development programme for librarians. Highlights of the training programme held at Sciences Po Paris in May 2017 can be seen in this video.
The United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library (DHL) and IFLA held side event titled : 2030 Vision: How Libraries Support the UN’s Work on Sustainable Development during the High Level Political Forum in New York. In the context of the official launch of the Development and Access to Information report on 17 July, this event was an opportunity to celebrate the role of libraries in delivering access to information at the global level. It underlined the importance of collaboration between libraries to build a global knowledge society. That is why laws, regulations, investments, infrastructure and librairies will need to coordinate themselves.
NASIG held its annual conference in Indianapolis June 8-11 2017. The conference theme was Racing to the Crossroads. Presenters positioned their talks around what librarians are racing toward and which crossroads concern them. Sessions covered include topics about identifying core competencies for e-resource librarians and breakout sessions on the nuts and bolts of collection assessment.
This article describes the results of a systematic review of peer-reviewed, published research articles about discovery layers, i.e. user-friendly interfaces or systems that provide single-search box access to library content. Focusing on articles in LISTA published 2009–2013, a set of 80 articles was coded for community of users, journal type, research method, and results. This study demonstrates that the scholarly communications surrounding discovery systems or layers are evolving, moving from technologists to a converging of general responsibilities and concerns, but with a pronounced focus on academic institutions. Nevertheless, there is little research published uniquely about public library users, more specifically about how discovery layers affect public libraries or children.
