DIVE+ has been awarded the Grand Prize at the LODLAM Summit, held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in June 2017. The summit brought together a hundred of experts in the community of Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums. DIVE+ is an event-centric linked data digital collection browser aimed to provide an integrated and interactive access to multimedia objects from various heterogeneous online collections. It enriches the structured metadata of online collections with linked open data vocabularies with focus on events, people, locations and concepts that are depicted or associated with particular collection objects. DIVE+ presentation is online.

KB+ is promoting an international initiative from non-commercial knowledge bases through an open letter. In order for libraries to have a good set of metadata and to optimise the functionalities of the systems in use at the libraries, KB+, together with ERDB-JP (Japan), ABES-BACON (France) and Bibsam, have published an Open Letter to System Vendors. The objective is to encourage a constructive dialogue to be able to maximise the impact of the metadata provided.

The IFLA IAP is a capacity-building programme designed to promote and support the role libraries can play in  planning and implementating the United Nations 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The IAP Update – May 2017 features activities and plans reported by IAP participants between February 2017 and the end of May 2017. The document’s structure mirrors the four regions (Africa, Asia Oceania, Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean) where the six IFLA IAP Regional Workshops have taken place.

This issue makes clear that IFLA Journal continues to mirror the overarching dialogues within the profession through the publication of research that represents widely held research problems within the profession and a diversity of scholars working to identify and develop applied solutions to issues that range from indigenous knowledge, digitization services, assessment, and the overall value of libraries and knowledge access to societies.

The self-publishing explosion and availability of self-publishing tools and services geared to libraries have heralded new opportunities for libraries, especially public libraries, to engage their communities in new ways. By supporting self-publishing initiatives in their communities, public libraries can promote standards of quality in self-publishing, provide unique opportunities to engage underserved populations, and become true archives of their communities.

The Scholarly Communication Librarian Core Competencies Task Force has completed a board-reviewed draft of core competencies. The Task Force intends to present its findings at the Members Forum on June 10th during the upcoming annual conference. All NASIG Conference attendees are welcome to offer comments. Through extensive investigation into recent position descriptions and continuing education opportunities, the task force identified four themes common to all scholarly communication librarians.

The Library of Congress is making 25 million records in its online catalog available for free bulk download at loc.gov/cds/products/marcDist.php. All those records use the MARC format, known to be a reliable international standard, and cover more than 45 years, ranging from 1968, during the early years of MARC, to 2014.

On May 8, 2017, several regional and national repository networks and stakeholder groups, including the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), formally endorsed an international accord that will lead to the greater alignment of repository networks around the world. The accord was developed by COAR, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, and aims to support open access and open science. It will foster closer relationships between the regional networks and act as a framework for undertaking specific activities and implementation of common functionalities.

OCLC and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Library are working together to make it easy for editors to link citations in Wikipedia to millions of library materials represented in WorldCat, the world’s largest database of information about library collections.

Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress (USA), member of IFLA Serials and Other Continuing Resources Section), reports on the CONSER Open Access Journal Project. This project cooperatively targets the DOAJ to assure that CONSER records are available for all journals in the DOAJ. It is designed to provide on-going coverage of new titles added to DOAJ. These CONSER records are in turn used by electronic resource management and access systems to track e-journal collections such as DOAJ and other e-journal collections. Ensuring accurate ISSN data is distributed for more consistent accessibility, and providing a consistent set of titles and metadata across different user information environments are among the benefits of this initiative.