24-26 June 2015 saw the 44th LIBER Annual Conference take place in London, organised by Imperial College London, the University of London, UCL and the London School of Economics and Political Science. LIBER is the Association of European Research Libraries with over 400 library members across Europe. The theme of the Conference was Towards Open Science – a global movement which sees openness and sharing as crucial themes in the processes involved in research and education.

The presentations are now available online.

IATUL, the International Association of Technological University Libraries held its annual conference in Hannover, Germany (5 – 9 July 2015) at the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB). From the red thread “Strategic Partnerships for Access and Discovery”, the conference enabled librarians from 42 countries to exchange on current and future developments in the area of strategy, management and practice in libraries. Making access to scientific information easier and faster for the benefits of users was at stake, with a strong focus on digital preservation programmes and experiences, as well as management of research data. The presentations are now available online.

Peter Burnhill / EDINA made a presentation about the ways to ensure continuity of access to the scholarly record.

There is a growing rift between those who believe the library’s most fundamental purpose is to support and advance the goals of its host institution and those who believe the library’s most important role is as an agent of progress and reform in the larger world of scholarly communication. Although these two areas of endeavor are not mutually exclusive, they are in competition for scarce resources and the choices made between them have serious implications.

In the absence of a market for academic publishing, the concept of average publication fees cannot be used for this purpose. A number of attempts are being made to create such a market, but new contracts for hybrid journals may thwart these initiatives. Libraries are at a crossroads. Will they continue in their current role of money collectors for publishers or revert to their original profession: independent quality control?

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) joined forces with Europeana and Creative Commons (CC) to create a collaborative, interoperable platform for international rights statements. The International Rights Statement Working Group (Working Group), composed of representatives from the three organizations, spent the past 12 months outlining a proposal for a common framework to provide rights statements for both national and international cultural heritage objects.

This White Paper gives an account of the latest developments in EDM and highlights the principles that are necessary for the model to continue as a suitable framework for cultural heritage data.

This white paper proposes recommendations and best practices for the implementation and use of statistics and metrics in academic digital libraries and repositories.

A presentation of BIBFLOW, an Institute of Museum and Library Services supported project that aims to document the internal effects of the conversion of library records to Linked Data, with a particular focus on the forthcoming BIBFRAME framework. The final deliverable of the project will be a road map to navigating the transition to Linked Data in libraries.

The National Library of the Netherlands (KB) and Portico announced a new partnership that will support the preservation of e-journals through the KB’s International e-Depot program which focuses on the preservation of e-journals from international scientific publishers. The KB will take advantage of Portico’s existing preservation expertise and infrastructure in order to ensure that scholars and researchers will have access to content in the future.

IFLA, along with Copyright for Creativity, EBLIDA, LIBER and Communia, hosted a meeting at the European Parliament on May 6th 2015. The meeting tackled the relationship between copyright and licenses, and argued that licensing is not the solution to the problems that libraries have in making available material to their users in the digital age.