The Internet and digital technologies have profoundly affected scholarly communication, publishing, collaborative research, literature searches, and management of digital assets and data. In turn, our views of the research life cycle have changed. What does this mean for librarians in the health sciences who support or even actively participate in clinical research?
Every year, UCL Centre for Publishing organises a session about the latest ideas, techniques and products regarding discovery tools. This year, the focus was set on improved content discovery through semantic enrichment, with notably the Europeana case study.
Presentations from the conference held on 18 January 2017 are available online.
Eliminating myths and misinformation about licensing electronic content is the best way to learn how to negotiate and interpret digital license agreements. The revised edition of Licensing Digital Content, A Practical Guide for Librarians covers the basics of digital licensing for librarians in a plain-language approach that demystifies the process.
Over 2016, Librarians and Wikipedians have been working together to showcase the many successful collaborations between libraries and Wikipedia. Opportunities papers highlight the ways libraries and Wikipedia are already engaging to verify information and make it accessible. The papers focus on Academic and Research Libraries and on Public Libraries. They are a starting point for further IFLA work on the practical and policy issues raised by the rise in the number of people generating their own content online, not least through Wikipedia.
Germany’s DEAL project, which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier’s academic and scientific journals, effective January 1, 2017. The boycott is in response to interrupted negociations about a nationwide licence agreement and Elsevier’s refusal to adopt « transparent business models » to « make publications more openly accessible. »
A report detailing the rise of the Google search among young academics has prompted debate about the future of libraries. This research, funded by the Publishing Research Consortium, looks at the attitudes to publishing of early career academics and suggests that libraries have “little to offer” to the next generation of academics.
Digital technologies have allowed for a richer, more diverse production of ideas and expressions than ever before. However, they also bring challenges as regards the preservation of cultural heritage. As part of the Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch) report 2016, focusing on economic, social and cultural rights and the Internet, IFLA has contributed an article setting out the issues from the library perspective.
The British Library makes its data available to researchers and other libraries free of charge in a variety of formats and access mechanisms: MARC21 via Z39.50, basic RDF/XML, Linked Open Data and Researcher Format (.csv). They are now seeking feedback on these free data services.
The Subject Analysis and Access IFLA section Annual report, 2016 outlines the Section’s progress and activities for the first semester.
IFLA Subject Analysis and Accesss Section new Action plan 2016-2017 outlines the key objectives for IFLA Section in the upcoming year and which are their projects to reach those goals.
