The British Library has published an updated evaluation of its economic contribution to the UK, looking at how the British Library creates economic value for its users and society as a whole.

The Library last undertook a study of this kind in 2003. The report shows that the economic value that the Library delivers is now almost five times its costs, representing a return on investment of 5:1.

Key findings reveal that the Library generates a net economic value of £419m for its users and UK society as a whole. The benefit cost ratio increased to 4.9 from 4.4 in 2003. When global value is considered the benefit cost ratio is 5.1. The value of the Library’s Reading Rooms is £70m per annum, including over £20 million for the Business & IP Centre.

The findings of the study will be used to inform internal strategic and business planning processes. The evaluation was conducted using benefit cost analysis (BCA) within a Total Economic Valuation (TEV) framework, in line with Treasury good practice guidelines. It was undertaken by Oxford Economics on behalf of the British Library.

A summary of the report and the full study is available online at http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/increasingvalue/index.html.

Credo, a US-based provider of information and digital literacy solutions for libraries, has launched 12 new and updated Subject and Publisher Collections. This new collection adds to more than 75 collections which is currently available for perpetual purchase or subscription. Libraries now have even more options for enhancing their Literati solution or Credo Online Reference Service with essential titles.

Credo has also released updates to seven existing Subject and Publisher Collections, including the popular Focus Medica Health Animation Collection and the Omnigraphics Health Reference Series. By embedding these high-quality reference collections in the award-winning Literati solution, libraries are able to build deep, specific e-book collections and combine authoritative content with innovative, customisable technology that links users of reference through to all of their library's resources.

Credo, a US-based provider of information and digital literacy solutions for libraries, has partnered with YBP Library Services to make its titles available for purchase through GOBI3, YBP's acquisition and collection management database. YBP is the academic division of Baker & Taylor.

Libraries now have the ability to select Credo as their preferred vendor for reference material as part of their eApproval Plans.

Selected to offer broad coverage of subjects such as religion, psychology, history, business, education, environmental studies and nursing, titles can be instantly integrated with both Literati, Credo's solution that includes information literacy tools, technologies and services, and the Credo Online Reference Service.

Credo seeks to offer quality reference titles that are enhanced with images, videos and audio to improve learning and information skills. These are paired with Topic Pages that act as a gateway for other library resources.

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) has announced the availability of data mining and analytics tools for the HathiTrust Digital Library, a collection of digital texts from over 70 research libraries around the world. The new tools seek to provide an entry point to large-scale analysis of HathiTrust's contents.

Indiana University and the University of Illinois are the founding partners of the HTRC. The new infrastructure release follows an aggressive development path set forth by the HTRC Executive Management Team at the 2012 HTRC UnCamp, a gathering of HTRC developers, researchers and librarians. Users can now expect to apply sophisticated computational research methodology across the large-scale collection, leveraging metadata crafted over time by libraries.

In phase two of the HTRC (September 2012-March 2013), the HTRC Technical Working Group created production versions of the beta services previewed at the 2012 UnCamp event. They are now working to open the resources to community testers who are part of the HTRC User Group Community.

The HTRC service stack, which provides the analytical entry point, is based on a completely new technical architecture. This framework leverages existing analytics tools such as SEASR (seasr.org), digital library software such as Blacklight, and a services-oriented architecture application interface. The current production phase includes a HTRC Sandbox that is open to scholars for evaluation of the HTRC services stack as part of their experiments.

Credo, a provider of information and digital literacy solutions for libraries, has deployed new technology that integrates its growing library of Topic Pages with EBSCO Discovery Service.

Students who search EDS will now see Topic Pages, which provide a gateway through Credo's trusted multimedia-rich reference content to other library resources, alongside their search results, providing a highly targeted starting point for deeper research. These searches will also retrieve Credo full-text reference entries, and will soon include high resolution images and videos.

Credo's new technology is available at no cost to libraries that subscribe to both Credo and EBSCO Discovery Service.

Credo, a provider of information and digital literacy solutions for libraries, has announced that it is integrating technology from ReadSpeaker, a provider of online text to speech, into its Literati solutions. ReadSpeaker’s text-to-speech technology is one of many recent additions to the innovative learning technologies that Literati combines with authoritative scholarly content and customisable services to help libraries do more.

The new text-to-speech technology is now available to the growing number of libraries that subscribe to Literati Public, the SIIA CODiE 2013 winner for Best General Reference Service. Text to speech will soon be added to Literati Academic, as well as to Literati School and Literati Student Athlete, which were both launched earlier this year.

ReadSpeaker claims to be the worldwide leader in online text to speech. ReadSpeaker speech enables online content on the fly in more than 35 languages and over 100 voices. The company provides a portfolio of web-based text-to-speech solutions for websites, mobile sites, mobile apps, RSS feeds, online documents and forms, and online campaigns. More than 5000 corporate, media, government, and non-profit customers around the world use ReadSpeaker online text-to-speech solutions.

Credo, a provider of information and digital literacy solutions for libraries, has announced the acquisition of OnlineTutorSolutions.com. It is expected that this acquisition will significantly enhance Credo's Literati solutions with technologies that connect students to on-staff, state-certified tutors at their point of need.

The acquisition furthers Credo's mission to work with libraries, educators, publishers and technology providers to create a society in which everyone has the ability to learn and an opportunity to succeed.

Literati is Credo's flagship solution that combines authoritative scholarly content, innovative technologies and customisable services to help libraries and educational institutions make the most of limited resources. The company has developed solutions to meet the unique needs of secondary school students, college students, student athletes and public library patrons.

Credo is experiencing record uptake of Literati in terms of new customers, partnerships and recognition by prestigious award programmes, including a 2013 SIIA CODiE Award for Literati Public.

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has shared the government's belief that research and innovation are imperative for Canada's long-term prosperity. It has stated that it is content to see some notable commitments in the 2013 Economic Action Plan.

CARL is reportedly pleased to see an additional $225 million allocated for Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) programmes. It is hopeful that this will enable the CFI to develop programming to enhance Canada's digital research infrastructure, notably so that researchers and innovators can take full advantage of the vast amounts of research data generated every year.

CARL believes that the government must increase its support for Canada's federal research granting agencies, which fund programmes that fuel scientific discovery in all fields. Nevertheless, the $37 million allocated for industry research partnerships will be helpful encouragement for new collaboration opportunities.

The association has also commended the government's commitment to celebrate Canadian history in the lead up to 2017. Museums and historical sites are important for the commemoration of history, but broader online access to the nation's documentary heritage will be crucial for teaching and researching its history, CARL has noted.

Finally, it notes the importance accorded to a number of other measures that favour increased access to information for all Canadians. Notable examples are the continued funding for infrastructure programmes that favour access to broadband Internet services and $3 million to improve access to library services by the visually disabled.

Credo, a provider of information and digital literacy solutions for libraries, has announced that Literati Academic was named a finalist for the 2013 SIIA Education CODiE Awards for Best Education Reference Solution. The SIIA CODiE Awards are the premier awards for the software and information industries, and have been recognizing product excellence for 27 years. The awards have over 75 categories and are organised by industry focus of Content, Education and Software.

This year's program features 23 Education categories, several of which are new or updated to reflect the latest industry trends and business models. Winners will be announced during a special awards dinner at the nation's leading education technology conference, the Ed Tech Industry Summit, in San Francisco on May 6.

Literati Academic combines authoritative scholarly content, innovative technologies and customisable services to help libraries and educational institutions make the most of limited resources. The company has also developed solutions to meet the unique needs of secondary school students, college students, student athletes and public library patrons. Literati Public recently received a CODiE Award for Best General Reference Service.

The British Library, the national library of the UK, has announced its intention to join the UK's Mooc platform, FutureLearn Ltd., offering participants of its online courses access to the Library's digitised resources. The Library will be the first non-university research institution to join the initiative, and is among five university partners announced during a major business and skills mission to India with the Prime Minister.

The launch of the FutureLearn Mooc (or 'Massive open on-line course') stems from the growth of online degree-style courses in the US, where companies such as edX and Coursera offer around 230 Moocs to more than 3 million students. The first ever UK Mooc, FutureLearn, was launched by the Open University last December and includes partnerships with 18 UK universities.

Existing Library digital resources will be made available on FutureLearn, complementing plans for large-scale participation in online lectures and courses which are due to start later this year. The Library's freely available digital collections include over 800 medieval manuscripts, 40,000 19th century books and 50,000 sound recordings, and continue to grow each year.

The new offer led by the Open University will mean that Indian students can access online courses from their home in Mumbai or Delhi. Futurelearn is a multi-university platform for free, open, online courses. It is a private company majority owned by the Open University.

Credo, a provider of information and digital literacy solutions for libraries, has announced that Literati Public was named a winner for the 2013 SIIA CODiE Awards for Best General Reference Service. Winners represent the information industry's best products, technologies and services created by or for media, publishers and information services providers.

The Literati solution includes a combination of authoritative reference content, technology that enhances discovery and connects learners with librarians and educators and customisable services that help promote digital and information literacy.

The SIIA CODiE Awards claim to be the industry's only peer-reviewed awards program. The first round review of all nominees is conducted by media, publishing, and information services executives with considerable industry expertise, including members of the industry, analysts, media and bloggers, and bankers and investors. The judges are responsible for selecting the CODiE Awards finalists. SIIA members then vote on the finalist products and scores from both rounds are tabulated to select the winners.

Winners were announced during a special Awards luncheon on January 31 in New York City during the SIIA's annual flagship conference for information industry leaders, IIS 2013: Breakthrough.

The British Library, the national library of the UK, recently welcomed the announcement by Rt Hon Vince Cable MP, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, outlining new exceptions to the UK's copyright framework.

In particular, the Library welcomes the exceptions that will now allow digital preservation of its collections including, for the first time, sound and film; non-commercial research copying of in-copyright sound and audiovisual content; non-commercial text and data mining of content that an organisation has purchased or has lawful access to; and the digitisation of its analogue collections for access on the premises.

The exceptions were recommended in the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth, commissioned by the Prime Minister in 2010.

Credo, a provider of information and digital literacy solutions for libraries, has announced that Literati Public has been named a finalist for the 2013 SIIA Content CODiE Awards for Best General Reference Service.

Serving as the pre-eminent awards programme for the software and information industries, the SIIA CODiE Awards have been honouring excellence for 27 years. This year's programme has 75 categories organised by industry focus in Content, Education and Software. Finalists in the Content categories represent the best products, technologies, and services created by or for media, publishers, and information services providers.

Literati Public, developed in close partnership with public librarians, is a customisable solution that promotes the mission of public libraries by combining Credo's content with newly developed platform technology. Its combination of innovative technology, engaging content and customised services promote digital and information literacy. More than 100 libraries have subscribed to Literati Public since it launched less than three months ago.

CODiE Award winners will be announced during a special luncheon on January 31 in New York City during the SIIA's annual flagship conference for information industry leaders, IIS 2013: Breakthrough.

British Library, the national library of the UK, has announced that five major research centres have expanded their commitment to make data more accessible through its DataCite service, a global initiative which addresses the problem of how to find, access and re-use the results of research. The Archaeology Data Service, the UK Data Archive, the Natural Environment Research Council, the Science & Technology Facilities Council and the Chinese genomics institute BGI have signed up to the service and are the first institutions to work with the British Library on this initiative.

Data from the participating organisations, which spans information derived from ice cores to gene sequences, cultural heritage to current populations, will be marked with DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) to enable it to be identified and cited, a system which has been widely used to provide persistent links to academic journal articles. This initiative provides a practical solution to one of the most significant challenges facing researchers today – access to data – an issue highlighted by the Royal Society in a report published in June this year. The report, ‘Science as an open enterprise’, recommended that scientists should communicate the data they collect in fieldwork and research more widely.

The benefits for researchers include confidence that the link to the data (or information about the data) will be persistently and uniquely identified; increased ease of citing data which will, in turn, increase its discovery and access, enabling others to verify the results and validate their own research; access to a myriad of new research opportunities which have been out-of-reach until now; and acknowledgement and credit for sharing data and having it cited.

Reference databases provider Credo Reference, US, has announced that it has added 'Librarian Connect' to its Literati solution. The new service offers texting capabilities along with chat and e-mail. It is powered by Mosio, Inc., a mobile software and solutions company providing text messaging and web solutions to help businesses connect with customers and their workforces on the go.

The Librarian Connect service includes functionalities like integration within the Literati platform for a seamless end-user experience, and web-based live chat that enables librarians to offer real-time assistance. The services comes pre-loaded with the library's customised educational videos and tutorials created by the Literati team for easy, on-demand distribution and offers e-mail response management.

Other features include 'Text a Librarian' via SMS, allows librarians to be accessible to end-users everywhere, and Schedule Text (SMS) Alerts that seek to increase mobile engagement through scheduled alerts and updates.

The University Libraries at Virginia Tech has joined the HathiTrust, a partnership of major academic and research libraries that are collaborating to build a digital library initiative that preserves and provides access to the published record in digital form.

As HathiTrust members, Virginia Tech students, faculty, and staff will have access to more than 3 million public domain books. The Virginia Tech community will be able to search HathiTrust's catalogue and download imprints in the public domain. Users can then create their own private libraries of these electronic imprints.

Also, because HathiTrust's collections are digitised, special access is available for users who are blind or visually impaired.

The University Libraries will contribute original content to HathiTrust's efforts as a sustaining partner. Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has more than 60 members and is growing. Over the last four years, the partners have contributed more than 10 million volumes to the digital library.

HathiTrust serves a dual role. First, it is a trusted repository. HathiTrust guarantees the long-term preservation of the materials it holds, and provides expert curation and consistent access long-associated with research libraries. Second, as a service for partners and a public good, HathiTrust offers persistent access to the digital collections. This access includes viewing, downloading, and searching capabilities to public domain volumes, as well as searching capability to volumes still restricted by copyright.

The British Library has announced that latest news and analysis from Elsevier Business Intelligence (EBI), a global leader in the field of healthcare industry information, is now available from the Library's Document Supply service. EBI provides business intelligence on regulatory, business and reimbursement issues that are vital to the healthcare industry.

The British Library's Document Supply service will provide electronic articles from all publications offered by EBI including The Pink Sheet, The Gray Sheet and InVivo. The licence signed by both organisations allows the British Library to supply EBI articles through its copyright fee paid service.

EBI provides business intelligence on regulatory, business and reimbursement issues that are vital to the healthcare industry. Through a range of products including publications, conferences, e-learning, databases and reports, Elsevier Business Intelligence places biopharma and medical device professionals, and those who focus on these industries, at the forefront of knowledge, by providing the perfect combination of news and information together with penetrating insight and analysis.

Reference databases provider Credo Reference, US, has announced that over 500 academic and public libraries around the globe have licensed its Literati solution. Literati helps end-users not only easily discover and use their library's authoritative content, but also understand the value of the library's resources over non-authoritative sources that are abundant on the open web.

According to the service provider, while Literati by Credo for academic libraries launched less than a year ago, and Literati Public has been available for less than a month, customers including Columbia University are already seeing value. In a recently published case study at Columbia University 87 percent of students said Literati improved the quality of their work. The case study is available by registering at http://tinyurl.com/columbialiterati.

The Literati solution includes embedded tools that guide the user; integration of the library's existing resources and discovery services (extending their value); tools that measure what works and what doesn't; and a growing collection of nearly 10,000 Topic Pages. Topic Pages alone are valued at over $3.5 million. Additional technologies such as the Mind Map provide a powerful way to visualise and understand the research process.

CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, is showcasing its science at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Apart from a range of books looking at the science of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the Laboratory will unveil a new interactive LHC time tunnel display. CERN will also announce collaboration with games developer Rovio to develop new educational resources for children linked to the latter's Angry Birds game.

The LHC time tunnel, built especially for the book fair, takes people into the world of sub-atomic particles by using motion sensors and projectors to visualise the effect of the Higgs field. Visitors can visualise protons moving inside the LHC and can kick virtual particles as hard as they can to see how they collide.

The CERN stand is based around a partial reconstruction of the CERN Control Centre, complete with live LHC status updates on the screens. Popular science books about CERN are on display, as well as the first computer used by Tim Berners-Lee to develop the original World Wide Web software, and the antimatter trap used in Hollywood blockbuster Angels & Demons.

On Friday October 12 at 1 pm, Angry Birds will fly through the CERN stand as CERN Director General Rolf Heuer and Rovio's Chief Marketing Officer, Peter Vesterbacka, announce the start of the collaboration to develop educational resources. On Saturday October 13, from 2.30 to 4 pm, Prof. Heuer will be signing the book LHC: the Large Hadron Collider, published by Austrian publisher Edition Lammerhuber in cooperation with CERN and UNESCO Publishing. This book features the photography of Peter Ginter and text from Austrian writer and playwright Franzobel with an introduction from Prof. Heuer.

Each day at 10:00, 12:00, 14:00 and 16:00 CERN physicists will present "Insights into the world's largest particle accelerator", giving audiences the latest updates about research into the smallest of nature's building blocks. These events will include live connections with the control rooms of CERN's LHC and the experiments ATLAS and CMS. Questions from the public will be answered in German and English. The CERN stand is B 1422 in Hall 4.2, the Hall for Expert Information, Science, Technology, and Education.

The CERN Director-General, Rolf Heuer, and the Cyprus Minister of Education and Culture, George Demosthenous, have signed an agreement under which Cyprus will become an Associate Member State in the pre-stage to Membership. The agreement will have to be ratified by the Parliament of Cyprus before coming into force.

Heuer noted that Cypriot physicists had made up a small but very active community at CERN for many years. The new status is expected to enable the country to derive greater benefit from the opportunities offered by CERN, whether through participation in scientific programmes, through industrial development or through education and training.

Demosthenous has said Cyprus considers the agreement to be the cornerstone of its efforts to support and enhance its scientific and research community.

In the early 1990s, Cyprus physicists took part in the L3 experiment at CERN's Large Electron Positron collider before joining the CMS collaboration, one of the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), in 1995. Cyprus is the third country to accede to the status of Associate Member State in the pre-stage to Membership after Israel in 2011 and Serbia earlier in 2012.

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) recently hosted its first annual HTRC UnCamp at Indiana University in Bloomington. The two-day event featured visionary speakers mixed with boot-camp activities and hands-on sessions with HTRC infrastructure and tools. It also fostered the growth of a diverse and inclusive scholarly community around the research center and its activities.

The HTRC is a collaboration between the University of Illinois, Indiana University, and the HathiTrust Digital Library, with the goal of creating cyberinfrastructure and computational tools to provide improved access to digitised collections. The collaborative initiative was launched to help meet the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of digital text that researchers face by developing cutting-edge software tools and cyberinfrastructure to enable advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge.

Leveraging data storage and computational infrastructure at Indiana University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the HTRC is developing a secure computational and data environment for scholars to perform research using the HathiTrust Digital Library. The center is breaking new ground in the areas of text mining and non-consumptive research, allowing scholars to fully utilise content of the HathiTrust Library while preventing intellectual property misuse within the confines of current U.S. copyright law.

The HTRC UnCamp attracted 130 attendees representing 44 institutions from across the United States. Illinois was prominently represented by 27 students, staff, and faculty, and HTRC provided financial support for 13 student participants from GSLIS and the Illinois Informatics Institute.

Core members of the HTRC team presented on the HTRC architecture and data API, collection building, and data analysis. Invited speakers demonstrated use cases, and participants selected four user-determined sessions on the role of HTRC in the classroom, HTRC as an anchor for digital humanities centers, OCR correction, and intertextual analysis. Photos and videos of the event, presentation slides, and an archive of the #htrc12 Twitter feed are now publicly accessible via the HTRC wiki.

Reference databases provider Credo Reference, US, has announced the launch of Literati for Public Libraries. The new solution combines core reference titles, technologies that increase discovery across all digital content platforms and customised training and marketing services and tools developed by on-staff librarians.

While a growing number of public libraries are investing in digital resources to meet the non-fiction needs of patrons, providing the technologies and tools to help patrons understand, discover and use these authoritative materials can be challenging. Libraries may not have the budget or bandwidth to promote their availability and value or provide adequate training on a variety of different platforms. Credo Reference aims to help solve this problem with its new solution - Literati Public.

An extension of the award winning Credo Reference platform, Literati Public delivers on three key components – content, technology and services.

Literati Public includes a base subscription to over 2.6 million full-text entries in relevant subjects such as health, history, literature, languages, technology, science and more, from trusted publishers such as Dorling Kindersley, ME Sharpe, Gray House Publishing, SAGE Reference, Barron’s, Wiley, Elsevier, Cengage Gale and many others. The nearly 500 full-text titles have been thoughtfully selected to best meet the needs of public libraries and represent nearly $60,000 in print volumes. The collection will continue to grow as new titles are added and existing titles are updated to new editions, all added seamlessly for subscribing libraries.

Literati's customisable Topic Pages integrate core reference works with a library's existing resources on specific subjects, extending their value and providing a rich research experience for patrons. Literati is packaged with a growing selection of nearly 10,000 topic pages – created by on-staff librarians – valued at over $3.5 million. It integrates with many discovery services including Summon, Primo Central, EDS, Encore and OCLC’s WorldCat.

Literati’s multi-faceted services support libraries in key areas including user guidance, library promotion and marketing, training and assessment and student services. Libraries and their patrons will benefit from homework help, interactive videos and tutorials, promotional materials, social media assistance and much more.

The British Library has welcomed the UK government's commitment to proceed with introducing the Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-print works) Regulations in April 2013. The statement by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (September 5, 2012) follows a public consultation which closed in May 2012.

Since the introduction of the 2003 Legal Deposit Libraries Act, the Legal Deposit Libraries have been working with the government and publishers to secure the necessary regulations to collect material published digitally and online.

The Non-Print Legal Deposit regulations would empower the British Library to collect, store and preserve the nation’s memory in the digital age. To date, much of the country's published heritage has reportedly been lost to a digital black hole with information and records of major events of the 21st century lost forever.

It is expected that a comprehensive archive of digital and non-printed materials, preserved for generations to come, will provide significant research benefits. This is seen to enable the creation of new knowledge, inspiring innovation and creating cultural and economic value for the UK.

arXiv, a US-based free repository that has reportedly revolutionised the way scientists share information, has announced that it is adopting a new governance and business model. An operating grant from the Simons Foundation, Cornell University Library has helped arXiv take a major step toward sustainability. Beginning in January and running through 2017, the Simons Foundation will provide up to $300,000 per year as a matching gift for the funds generated through arXiv’s membership fees. The grant also provides $50,000 per year as an "unconditional gift" that reportedly recognises the Library’s stewardship of arXiv.

The Cornell University Library is seen to have been steering arXiv toward sustainability since January 2010, when it launched an initiative to create a business model that would engage libraries and research laboratories that benefit most from arXiv's service. A 2011 planning grant from Simons Foundation helped arXiv's leaders develop operating principles and establish a governing board for the new model.

Annual membership fees, paid by voluntary contribution from these institutions, help cover arXiv’s costs — and, now, will provide a sum for the Simons Foundation to match.

The newly established model has garnered partners all over the globe. To date, more than 120 member institutions in over a dozen countries have pledged their support, totalling $285,000. Among the 100 institutions that use arXiv most heavily, nearly three-quarters committed to five-year pledges.

arXiv has been based at Cornell since founder Paul Ginsparg joined the faculty in 2001. The repository includes research in physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science and related disciplines. As an open access service, it allows scientists to share "preprint" research before publication and reportedly boasts hundreds of thousands of contributors. In 2011 alone, arXiv saw close to 50 million downloads from all over the world and received more than 76,000 new submissions.

Safari Books Online, an on-demand digital library for technology, digital media and business professionals, has announced their next generation Safari To Go apps which are free apps designed specifically for Apple and Android phone and tablet users.

The new apps are more than 'mobile-ready' versions of Safari Books Online. They allow users to consume and manage content, navigating in a familiar and comfortable environment, from their mobile device of choice. The Safari To Go apps make learning on the go convenient and easy by giving users the ability to pick up where they left off from any Safari Books Online reading platform.

The Safari To Go apps can be downloaded from the Apple App store and from Google Play for Android device owners.

Safari Books Online is an on-demand digital library that delivers a wide range of vetted learning resources in both book and video form from the world's leading authors in technology, digital media and business. Technology professionals, software developers, web designers, and business and creative professionals use Safari Books Online as their primary resource for research, problem solving, learning and certification training.

The parties in the Authors Guild vs HathiTrust case have reportedly filed motions for summary judgment. While the Authors Guild asserted that it should win because the library defendants had no viable defence for their mass-digitisation programme, the HathiTrust argued that it should win because its programme clearly fell under fair use. A third motion was also filed, in support of the HathiTrust, by the National Federation of the Blind.

In its copyright infringement suit, filed in September of 2011, the Authors Guild alleges that the HathiTrust, a digitisation collective of research libraries, is built with millions of ‘unauthorised’ scans created by Google.

The suit seeks an injunction barring the libraries from future digitisation of copyrighted works; and from providing works to Google for its scanning project. It also seeks to bar Google from proceeding with its plan to allow access to ‘orphan works.’ Additionally, the suit asks the court to ‘impound’ all unauthorised scans and to hold them in escrow ‘pending an appropriate act of Congress.’

The Authors Guild brief argues that libraries have deprived authors of potential sales, exposed their books to ‘potentially catastrophic security risks,’ and undermined the copyright owners’ ability to decide whether, when and under what circumstances to participate in existing or new licensing opportunities.

The HathiTrust motion for summary judgement relies almost entirely on fair use. It asserts that all four factors of the fair use analysis either favour or ‘tilt toward’ the libraries. HathiTrust attorneys also argue that there is no evidence of the market harms the Authors Guild claims.

Opposition briefs are due on July 20, and replies in support of summary judgement are due on July 27.

Reference databases provider Credo Reference, US, has announced plans to serve Public Libraries with Literati Public, a new expression of its suite of Digital and Information Literacy solutions.

Literati Public, developed in close partnership with public librarians, is a customisable solution that promotes the mission of public libraries by combining Credo’s content with newly developed platform technology.

In the quest to find new ways to meet the demands of today's information user, Credo looked at key challenges and opportunities to offer more to public library patrons. Beyond its platform customisability, Literati Public offers libraries a broad collection of e-books tailored to the vast needs of public libraries and newly developed tools and services to help them promote their brand, events and outreach programmes and to extend their valuable services to the community.

Literati Public will help libraries to meet their goals in key areas including funding, community outreach, local school collaboration, digital literacy education, library marketing and promotion and usage of library resources.

Literati Public will be previewed at the upcoming ALA Annual conference in Anaheim, CA, in concert with Credo’s Amazing Stories from the Library contest. The solution will be available in October 2012.

Reference databases provider Credo Reference, US, has announced that CQ Press is the latest publisher to join Credo Reference with an agreement to include 40 of their most sought-after titles in Credo Publisher and Subject Collections.

According to the company, apart from attracting new publishers the popularity of Credo Publisher and Subject Collections have enticed existing publishing partners to expand their relationships. Publishers that have recently opted to be part of Publisher and Subject Collections include F.A. Davis, Rutgers University Press and Omnigraphics – together making nearly 100 new titles available in collections from Credo Reference.

Publishers expanding their existing agreements to offer more titles include SAGE Reference, Taylor and Francis, ABC-CLIO, IGI Global and Focus Medica.

This growth is not limited to Publisher and Subject Collections. Credo General Reference Premium adds new titles and publishers regularly and now offers over 600 titles.

Ed Vaizey, the UK Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, has appointed Patrick Plant to the Board of the British Library, for terms of four years, starting on 15 May 2012.

Patrick Plant is a commercial property lawyer with 25 years experience and extensive commercial contacts in the UK and abroad. Plant has recently retired as an equity partner of the global law firm, Linklaters, having, for a number of years, acted as its Global Head of Real Estate where he acted as lead counsel on a number of major property projects. He remains as partner consultant with the firm responsible for a number of roles, including overseeing the firm's global premises network. Mr Plant is also a Non-Executive Director with Falcon Property Trust.

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the greatest research libraries in the world. Taken together, the scope of its remit, the scale of its operations, the range of its services and the international importance of its collections are without equal. It provides information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection.

By 2020, the British Library aims to be a leading hub in the global information network, advancing knowledge through its collections, expertise and partnerships, for the benefit of the economy and society and the enrichment of cultural life. The Library's collection has developed over 250 years and exceeds 150 million separate items representing every age of written civilisation and includes books, journals, manuscripts, maps, stamps, music, patents, photographs, newspapers and sound recordings in all written and spoken languages. Over 4.1 million items are consulted in the Library's Reading Rooms every year, 812,000 visited Library events and exhibitions on 2010/11 and over 10 million people.

The Board of the British Library, the national library of the UK, has appointed Roly Keating as the Library’s new Chief Executive Officer (CEO). Keating, currently Director of Archive Content at the BBC, and a former Controller of BBC Two and BBC Four, will take up his new role on September 12, 2012.

In his role as Director of Archive Content, Keating acts as overall editorial leader for the BBC’s online services, including BBC iPlayer. This role is also responsible for the development and implementation of the BBC’s strategy to increase digital access to its massive archives, including the new Arts Council England partnership The Space and the proposed download-to-own initiative Project Barcelona.

Roly Keating will take over from Dame Lynne Brindley, who will be leaving the Library on July 31, 2012 after 12 years as Chief Executive.

The University of Delaware Library has announced that it has become one of the latest members of HathiTrust, a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form.

The University of Delaware Library plans to contribute public domain volumes digitised through in-house projects to the HathiTrust.

Launched in 2008, the HathiTrust has a growing membership currently comprising more than 60 partners. Over the last two years, the partners have contributed more than eight million items to the digital library, digitised from their library collections through a number of means including Google, the Internet Archive digitisation and in-house initiatives. More than two million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the web.

The HathiTrust serves a dual role. First, as a trusted repository it guarantees the long-term preservation of the materials it holds, providing the expert curation and consistent access long associated with research libraries. Second, as a service for partners, the HathiTrust offers persistent access to the digital collections. This includes viewing, downloading, and searching access to in copyright volumes. Specialised features are also available which facilitate access by persons with print disabilities, and allow users to gather subsets of the digital library into 'collections' that can be searched and browsed.

HathiTrust has announced the composition of its new 12-member Board of Governors, which will lead the library collaborative into its next phase. HathiTrust is a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in an extraordinary digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form.

The board, which replaces the Executive Committee established by the founding members in 2008, will oversee HathiTrust’s 10-million volume digital preservation repository, research center, and other initiatives. The decision to create the board was made during the HathiTrust Constitutional Convention held in October 2011, which was convened to chart HathiTrust's governance structure and priorities going forward.

The board officially begins work on April 16, 2012. Among its first priorities will be to implement the remaining proposals passed during the Constitutional Convention. These include the establishment of a distributed archive of print monographs corresponding to the digital copies held in HathiTrust; the creation of an approval process for proposed new initiatives; a fee-for-service model for content deposit; a mechanism for allowing non-partners to contribute content to the repository; and a coordinated effort to expand access to digitised US federal government documents.

The Archive and Modern Manuscripts Program of the National Library of Medicine’s History of Medicine Division recently worked with Cengage Learning to complete two full-collection digitisation projects for Archives Unbound, Cengage’s online digital archive and manuscripts resource. Cengage Learning is a provider of innovative teaching, learning and research solutions for the academic, professional and library markets worldwide.

The collections total over 70,000 images. Patrons can freely view the collections via Archives Unbound in the HMD reading room or add the collections to their local Archives Unbound accounts. They may also consult the physical holdings in the HMD Reading Room. HMD is currently planning to provide this content, as well as that of other collections, via its own open access digital manuscripts presence.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is a component of the US’ National Institutes of Health.

The British Library, the national library of the UK, in its evidence to the Intellectual Property Office’s Copyright Consultation which closed on March 21, 2012, has said that changes to the copyright system would benefit UK innovation. Its submission is seen to make the case for reforms that will deliver tangible benefits for the cultural, education and research sectors.

According to Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, the Government is right to say that the UK’s copyright framework needs fundamental reform if it is to support growth. The Library welcomes all ways to enable mass scale digitisation and to support the preservation of its collections. The common sense approach to dealing with orphan works and extended collective licensing are especially welcome, as are the provisions to allow sound and film to be copied for research purposes, and the proposals for text and data mining.

The system must continue to respect the rights and rewards of rightsholders, it has pointed out. However, these proposals would make the copyright framework fit for purpose in the digital age – unleashing the potential of UK research today and in the future. The British Library has urged the Government to take forward these proposals without delay.

The Harvard Library has announced that it will deposit about 200,000 public domain volumes in HathiTrust, a shared digital repository for published materials. The move follows Harvard's first deposit of about 53,000 volumes in HathiTrust in 2011.

The Harvard Library, founded in 1638, claims to be the world’s largest university library and the oldest academic library in North America. With approximately 17 million books, more than eight million photographs and an estimated 400 million manuscript items, the Library’s holdings span a vast range of subjects, languages and dates.

HathiTrust was formed in 2008 with a mission to ‘contribute to the common good by collecting, organising, preserving, communicating and sharing the record of human knowledge.’ Currently, the shared repository has more than sixty institutional participants and contains more than 10 million digitised volumes, with more than 2.7 million public domain works are available online.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the US’ National Institutes of Health, reached a benchmark at the conclusion of its 175th anniversary year, 2011, when it scanned its one millionth page for the Medical Heritage Library Project.

NLM is contributing Medicine in the Americas to the Medical Heritage Library Project, a cooperative venture to digitise historical materials from the collections of the NLM, the Countway Library at Harvard, the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Library at Yale, the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and the New York Public Library (http://www.medicalheritage.org). The goal of the project, launched in January 2010, is to digitise books and journals that document the evolution of American medicine from 17th century colonial medicine to 20th century research hospitals. The whole of NLM's contribution of over 6,000 books will be available through NLM's Digital Collections repository, and the entire content of the Medical Heritage Library will be available through the Internet Archive.

Medicine in the Americas titles are selected from the NLM's History of Medicine Division (HMD), including books and pamphlets from the US, Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada. The collection currently features items from 1610 to 1865. Topics covered include anatomy, military medicine, medical education, medical jurisprudence, public health, psychiatry and nursing. Future work will encompass titles published through 1920.

The Medical Heritage Library, a digital curation collaborative, is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and administered by the Open Knowledge Commons. The Medicine in the Americas files will reside in NLM's Digital Collections repository.

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Reference databases provider Credo Reference, US, has announced that their new solution 'Literati by Credo' is now available to libraries worldwide.

Literati by Credo is a collaborative research platform that promotes research effectiveness and information literacy by combining Credo's content with innovative library-centric technology. Beyond the platform, Literati by Credo offers customised tools and services, so that libraries can brand and enhance their end-user experience.

The announcement of general availability marks the end of Literati's beta period in which a select number of institutions utilised and tested the new solution. The beta group included institutions such as Columbia University, Marshall University, South University, Lancashire Libraries and the American University of Paris.

Developed in partnership with the library and teaching faculty, the information literacy tools and services offered as part of Literati by Credo enable the building of appropriate information-seeking challenges into assignments and course learning objectives.

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Washington University Libraries has joined HathiTrust, a partnership of major academic and research libraries to preserve and provide access to the published record in a digital form. The announcement was made by Shirley K. Baker, Washington University’s vice chancellor for scholarly resources and dean of University Libraries.

WUSTL is now partnering with more than 60 other major academic and research libraries from across the United States and the world in an effort to preserve and share the record of human knowledge.

Currently, HathiTrust’s repository contains more than 10 million volumes, most of which were digitised from the collections of American and British research libraries as part of the Google Books Library Project, Google’s effort to scan and make searchable the collections of several major research libraries. WUSTL users may search the HathiTrust online catalogue at hathitrust.org or libguides.wustl.edu/hathitrust.

If a desired volume is under copyright, the full text will not be displayed, but the search will list nearby libraries that have a copy. Of the HathiTrust’s 10 million volumes, more than 2.7 million are in the public domain.

Current students, faculty or staff at Washington University or at any other HathiTrust partner institution may download any of the public domain volumes held in HathiTrust.

In addition to gaining new access for current students, faculty and staff, WUSTL Libraries will have the opportunity to digitise rare or unique public domain works from their own collections and deposit those digitised materials in the HathiTrust repository, where they may be accessed by persons affiliated with any of the HathiTrust members.

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The British Library, the national library of the UK, together with technology partner BiblioLabs, LLC, has been awarded the Publishing Innovation Award (PIA) for their British Library 19th Century Historical Collection iPad App. The award was announced at the opening of the Digital Book World Conference in New York City.

The App, released in August 2011 to rave reviews from both critics and consumers, offers seamless, cloud-based access to more than 45,000 historical works from the British Library, spanning 21 thematic collections.

The Publishing Innovation Awards were established to honour outstanding digital products that enrich and delight readers. The British Library 19th Century Historical Collection App was named the 2012 winner in the Reference/Academic category.

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Reference databases provider Credo Reference, US, has announced the hiring of Charles Griswold and Michael McFarland. The twin technical hires are seen to bring a new dimension of digital depth to the existing product team at Credo Reference.

In his role as VP of Product Development and Innovation, Griswold will lead the team responsible for building and delivering innovative solutions. He previously led teams at Accenture, Digitas and Answerthink and was the founder and CEO of LogixPartners, a software and consulting company for the insurance industry that was centered around web-based technology.

McFarland comes to Credo Reference with an extensive background in project management, technology strategy planning and product development. He was previously a founding member of Life123.com, an Ask.com company that was part of the IAC/InterActive network of sites that included Match.com, Evite and Citysearch. He joins Credo as Senior Technical Manager, and will be responsible for cloud service management, overall performance management, operational integrity, and customer consultative services.

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Online reference service provider Credo Reference, US, has announced a new partnership with information services company, Swets, Netherlands.

Under the deal, Swets will incorporate Credo Reference with over 1,500 reference works from more than 80 of the world's best reference publishers into the SwetsWise eBook catalogue. Collections and titles are thoughtfully selected to offer broad coverage of subjects such as psychology, history, business, education, environmental studies and much more.

According to Linda Vendryes, Global Business Development Manager at Swets, expanding SwetsWise to include content from Credo Reference offers customers a single, user-friendly interface to acquire and manage both eBooks and journals.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo's General Reference service empowers librarians and effortlessly delivers authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Credo now offers Publisher and Subject Collections which offer libraries deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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Safari Books Online, an on-demand digital library for technology, digital media and business professionals, has acquired US-based Threepress Consulting Inc, makers of the Ibis Reader online EPUB reading system. The acquisition, which was completed on January 1, 2012, further enhances Safari Books Online's capability to deliver customised subscription learning content online.

As part of the acquisition, Threepress co-founders Liza Daly and Keith Fahlgren and the rest of the Threepress staff will join the Safari Books Online engineering team, working from their East Coast and Bay Area locations. Daly will become the VP of Engineering while Fahlgren will assume the role of Director of Engineering.

Threepress' technology expertise including EPUB tools, HTML5, CSS, JavaScript technology and digital publishing methodologies will support Safari Books Online’s efforts to constantly improve browser-based and mobile delivery of a large digital library of book, video and learning content.

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The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), the National Library of the Netherlands, and the nation's National Archives (NA) will be integrated into one organisation. This was recently decided by the Cabinet following a proposal from Secretary of State Zijlstra (OCW: Ministry of Education, Culture and Science). The integration is seen as a logical continuation of the substantial cooperation between both institutions, and is in line with the aim of the Cabinet to make the government more compact. The planned launch date for the new organisation is July 1, 2013.

The NA and the KB already work together in a number of areas. For instance, they together carry out 'Metamorfoze', the programme for the preservation of paper heritage, and have been working together for years in the area of conservation research. In 2005 the Prince of Orange opened the exhibition space, 'The Legacy of the Netherlands', where both institutions have already held a number of exhibitions of their treasures. In the course of this year, preparations have been made within both institutions to give shape to a more intense cooperation. The KB and NA wish to exploit the advantages of scale which a combination of the institutions - located in two, interconnected buildings in The Hague - offers and so together face the challenges of the digital era.

The KB is an autonomous administrative authority; the NA is an agency of OCW. To realise an administrative integration of the two an amendment of the Public Records Act and the Higher Education and Research Actare required. These will be prepared in the coming year. Eventually, both organisations will be merged into one autonomous administrative authority. The aim is to complete this path in a year and a half, with a launch date for the new organisation of July 1, 2013 as the point of departure.

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The Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) has agreed an extension of the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) Document Delivery Licence with the British Library that allows the licensed supply of articles to overseas non-commercial end-users via overseas not-for-profit libraries at a special fixed rate.

The British Library plans to launch its International Non-Commercial Document Supply (INCD) service, with effect from January 1, 2012. It will initially run for a trial period of two years. The agreement is based on the Publishers' Association (PA) supported framework agreement recently agreed between the British Library and the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) and which they recommend to publishers.

The Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) represents the interests of publishers in the collective licensing of photocopying and digital copying. Together with the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society, PLS owns and directs the Copyright Licensing Agency and works in partnership with the Design and Artists Copyright Society. PLS is owned by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, the Professional Publishers Association, and the Publishers Association.

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The British Library, the national library of the UK, has welcomed the consultation (professional section) issued by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) which calls for evidence to inform the impact assessment of the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property.

The British Library's submission to the Hargreaves Review included calls for reforms to make it easier for cultural institutions to archive as well as mass digitise their collections. Any mass digitisation will include Orphan Works – an item where the rights-holder cannot be identified or located– and a solution for this will deliver benefits for research and education.

The Library also supports the extension of fair dealing to sound and film, moves to ensure copyright law is not undermined by private contracts, measures to allow text and data mining with a view to encouraging medical, environmental and other scientific research – as well as streamlined processes (extended collective licensing) for the mass clearing of rights for commercially-produced works to be used in digital library projects.

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The Executive Council of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division (PSP), Association of American Publishers (AAP), has endorsed a new cross-border licensed document delivery service for educational uses developed by the British Library.

Launching January 1, 2012, the International Non-Commercial Document Supply Service (INCD) represents a three-way agreement between the British Library, publishers who choose to contract with the service, and qualifying, authorised not-for-profit libraries. The framework will enable these publishers and libraries to cooperatively provide copyrighted journal articles to the libraries' users, such as students, faculty and researchers, for non-commercial research or private study.

The INCD agreement was developed by the British Library in cooperation with the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) and the UK Publishers Association. Articles will be available at a fee below the normal commercial rate and accessible globally on a rapid basis. The British Library will monitor, maintain compliance for and govern the supply of journal article copies licensed by end users globally. The agreement specifies an annual cap in the number of items: nine articles from a journal's annual volume(s) or nine items published in the same book or work — that may be delivered to the same institution. This new service is distinct from publishers' and the British Library's commercial document delivery activities.

Earlier this week, the British Library signed an agreement with publishers Elsevier and Taylor and Francis for document delivery outside the UK to non-commercial researchers. The agreement governs the supply of copies of articles from the British Library's Document Supply Service to non-commercial end users via not-for-profit libraries outside the UK.

Search for more Regulations, guidelines and other institutional frameworks

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The British Library, the national library of the UK, has signed an agreement with publishers Elsevier and Taylor and Francis for document delivery outside the UK to non-commercial researchers. The agreement governs the supply of copies of articles from the British Library's Document Supply Service to non-commercial end users via not-for-profit libraries outside the UK.

Any articles to be supplied under this new service are solely for an end-user's own private study or non-commercial research purposes. The terms of the licence are distinct from the Library's successful service for the supply of articles for commercial purposes, and shall require end-users and not-for-profit libraries to ensure that the differentiation between commercial and non-commercial use of articles is actively monitored and differentiated.

The framework agreement signed by the publishers has the backing of three of the relevant trade associations, International STM, Publishers Association and ALPSP. All three have recommended that the member publishers participate in the framework agreement.

The British Library's Overseas Library Privilege Service will be phased out from the start of 2012. The library will contact all existing licensors of STM content it currently has a direct digital agreement with and who are yet to sign the framework licence agreement. It will also contact all non-UK, non-commercial libraries currently registered to discuss eligibility for the new service and how to proceed.

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The Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology (WLM) has embarked on a project that will bring its collection of rare books, multimedia materials and artefacts to people around the world. The collection of information regarding the history of anaesthesia is stated to reside at the WLM in Park Ridge, Illinois, and its digitisation project is bringing its anaesthesia library and museum online at http://www.woodlibrarymuseum.org.

The WLM website has been redesigned to make it easier for those interested in anaesthesia history to find texts or artefacts of interest. The two-stage website project entails upgrading technology that will allow the digitised artefacts to be easily viewed as well as improving the availability of the rare books, the living history series and other important historical items from its vast collections, and building on that technology to bring the collections to life. The goal has been to provide a virtual museum and library that the world will be able to view and enjoy for years to come.

Those who are unable to visit the WLM are now able to view the various rare books, apparatus and videos through the virtual museum. Archival collections will also be included in the Artifact Digitization Project, thus allowing pieces that are not on display in the gallery to be viewed online. WLM has already captured digital images of over 100 of the rare items from its collection, with both 3-D virtual pictures and 2-D images.

The WLM is also in the process of digitising its collection of rare books and papers. Of its 2,000 plus books and papers, 250 have already been digitised with “turn-the-page� capability so online visitors can read the pages with ease. The WLM is concentrating its efforts on scanning rare books that are not already available in electronic format.

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The British Library, the national library of the UK, has announced that Chief Executive, Dame Lynne Brindley will step down from her position at the end of July 2012, after twelve successful years. The British Library Board has begun the process of recruiting a successor.

Under her leadership, the British Library has developed as a major cultural and scholarly institution. She has made the Library much more accessible to researchers, business users, and the public, and has led a major strategic development and modernisation programme to ensure that the Library is relevant, innovative and accessible in the digital age.

Lynne plans to add to her portfolio of interests, which include non-executive Board membership of Ofcom, the Court of the Goldsmiths' Company and several research and higher education bodies.

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Online reference service provider Credo Reference, US, has announced a new partnership with publisher Brill Publishing. Beginning in 2012, the Brill Religion Collection will join the thirty-eight existing Publisher Collections available from Credo Reference.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customizable, 'best-in-class' reference collections for libraries since 2002. With its unique cross-referencing technology, Credo's General Reference service empowers librarians and effortlessly delivers authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide.

Publisher and Subject Collections offer libraries deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers. literati by Credo, launching in 2012, will offer tools and services to improve Information Literacy.

Search for more Reference Tools

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Online reference service provider Credo Reference, US, has announced that Gina McCue has joined the company as Vice President, Strategic Accounts. She will leverage her experience as a successful senior executive to lead the work with institutions on adoption and implementation of Credo's recently announced solution, literati by Credo.

Gina will be collaborating with consortia, research libraries and discovery system partners to support Information Literacy programmes at institutions worldwide.

Prior to joining Credo, Gina served as the VP of North American Sales and Global Business Development for ebrary. Her previous roles included global sales and marketing management positions at SilverPlatter Information, Ovid Technologies, and Wolters Kluwer Health.

In her library career, she has focused on consortia and statewide arrangements, channel partnerships, and content product development for libraries and information professionals.

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Dan Ream of VCU Libraries is conducting a workshop titled 'Open Access Scholarly Publishing for Faculty' on October 27, 2011, from 1pm to 2pm.

As journal subscription costs have increased dramatically, fewer and fewer libraries can afford every journal that is needed, including some that are considered prestigious and essential. Faculty worldwide have responded by creating and publishing their research in open access (OA), peer-reviewed journals that charge no fee to their readers. Faculty Senates from Harvard to Berkeley to the University of Virginia have endorsed OA publishing for their faculty, with a few even mandating that their faculty share their research with the world via OA publishing.

VCU's Faculty Senate last year passed a resolution urging the VCU promotion and tenure committees to reconsider the value of peer-reviewed OA publishing in promotion and tenure deliberations.

Next week's one-hour session, open to all, will introduce faculty to this revolution in publishing of open-access, peer-reviewed journals and demonstrate how to locate them in almost any discipline. It will also discuss the potential benefits of worldwide free access to faculty research. Options for faculty retention of copyright will also be discussed.

The workshop will be held in library classroom/lab 319 in James Branch Cabell Library. No advance registration is necessary. A repeat session will also be offered on November 7 at 1 pm at the same location.

Search for more Conferences

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The University of Miami has become the latest member of HathiTrust, a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in an extraordinary digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form.

According to William Walker, Dean and University Librarian, the University’s HathiTrust membership will give the UM community access to an additional 2.6 million public domain books published before 1923. The volumes were primarily scanned from the collections of American and British research libraries, including The University of Michigan, Stanford, the New York Public Library, Oxford University, and Harvard, primarily as part of the Google Books Project.

As members of the Trust, members of the UM community will be able to search the Trust catalogue and download imprints in the public domain. This will allow UM users to create private libraries of these electronic imprints. The UM Libraries will also be able to contribute digitised works that can be uploaded into the Trust’s repository.

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The British Library, the national library of the UK, has welcomed the announcement made by the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) to support the open licensing of their data. This will mean that datasets describing millions of books and texts published in Europe will become increasingly accessible for anyone to re-use for whatever purpose they wish.

Since 2009, the UK Government has been committed to the opening-up of public data for wider re-use. A report entitled ‘Putting the Frontline First: Smarter Government’ required that the majority of government-published information to be reusable, linked data by June 2011. It was therefore understood that public sector institutions including the British Library should develop an appropriate response to this new environment and begin to make their data freely available.

The British Library’s open metadata strategy is designed to remove barriers and enable increased innovation without imposing unnecessary restrictions. This resulted in the British Library announcing in August 2010 that it would be opening up its rich set of bibliographic metadata for re-use.

Since then, the Library has signed up over 400 organisations in 69 countries to a free catalogue data service; created a linked open data version of the British National Bibliography; become one of the first signatories of the JISC Discovery Open Metadata Principles and started to offer sets of metadata to researchers under a permissive Creative Commons license.

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The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has announced that it will be holding its second Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, on September 26-27, 2011.

The conference is intended for users of NLM's Journal Article Tag Suite, a set of standards to publish, author, archive or exchange journal articles and other documents. Originally developed as the data structure for journals participating in NLM's PubMed Central archive, the Tag Suite has achieved strong acceptance among publishers and authors and has been adopted by the Portico and Highwire Press archives, the British Library, and the Library of Congress for electronic journal articles. The Tag Suite will soon be standardised as National Information Standards Organization (NISO) Z39.96.

JATS-Con will be held in the Natcher Conference Center at NIH and will be videocast. The peer-reviewed conference will include a broad range of information on the Tag Suite, from the technical to publishing theory, and will feature speakers from NLM, the Library of Congress, and many others.

To register for the free conference or to watch the videocast, interested parties may visit the JATS-Con website at http://jats.nlm.nih.gov/jats-con. The agenda, proceedings from the 2011 and 2010 conference, and information for visitors are also available on the website.

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The British Library, the national library of the UK, as part of the wider EU funded ARROW (Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works) project, has published a study into rights clearance and mass digitisation. The study examines the issue of orphan works.

'Seeking New Landscapes: A rights clearance study in the context of mass digitisation of 140 books published between 1870 and 2010’ found that more efficient ways of clearing rights and providing cultural institutions with legal certainty over their activities are needed to ensure that highly valuable research materials do not remain out of reach of the vast majority of citizens.

Through analysis of a representative set of titles published within the 140 years, the study demonstrates a need for innovative solutions in relation to mass digitisation projects. The study found that manual rights clearance of works on an individual, item by item basis is unworkable in the context of mass digitisation which can potentially involve the copying and making available of millions of copyright works.

Due to the complexities of identifying rights holders and clearing works the study found that it took an average of four hours research and clearance activity per book – with some works very quick to research and others taking significantly longer than four hours. At four hours per book it would take one researcher over 1,000 years to clear the rights of just 500,000 books. In contrast the use of the ARROW system would take less than five minutes per title to upload the catalogue records and check the results.

The significant presence of orphan works is seen to strengthen the case that a legislative solution for this category of works is needed across Europe to allow access to millions of highly valuable research materials. The study also shows that the development of the ARROW system is highly encouraging, indicating that it could provide a technical solution to support diligent search and new rights clearance processes and support legal access to millions of highly valuable research and other materials.

In the UK, the ARROW system should become a key plank of the Digital Copyright Exchange, according to Prof. Ian Hargreaves. He stated this in his recent governmental review of intellectual property and growth – “Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property�.

ARROW is a project coordinated by the Italian Publishers Association (AIE), funded by the European Commission within the eContentplus programme. The initial phase of the ARROW project was concluded in February 2011 and the follow-up phase – ARROW Plus – is now underway as a flagship project of the European Commission.

The UConn Libraries have become the latest member of HathiTrust Digital Library, a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating to compile a massive digital library of published scholarship.

HathiTrust includes material from the Google Books Library Project, an effort by Google to scan and make searchable the collections of several major research libraries. It also includes material from the Internet Archive, a non-profit that offers free online access to historical digital collections, in which UConn has been an active participant since 2008.

HathiTrust allows users to do full-text searches of all the books in the repository, as well as download all material in the public domain. In addition, members of the community who are visually impaired will be able to download the full text of material that is in copyright for use with assistive technology.

HathiTrust was launched in 2008 by the then 12-university consortium, known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University of California system. It has grown to more than 50 partners, including Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Duke, and Johns Hopkins. UConn is the first public research university in New England to become a member.

In the past two years, HathiTrust’s partners have contributed more than 9 million volumes to the digital library, digitised from their library collections. More than 2 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and are freely available on the Web.

HathiTrust serves as a secure repository, guaranteeing the long-term preservation of the material while providing expert care and consistent access to research libraries. It also acts as a bridge between partners and the public, offering access to the digital collections that includes viewing, downloading, and searching.

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Online reference service provider Credo Reference, US, has announced that Robert Deutsch has joined the company as Senior Director of Marketing. He will be responsible for the strategic planning and execution of marketing strategies around the growth and expansion of Credo's product line.

Deutsch arrives at Credo after six years with IAC/InterActive Corp, the company behind portals such as Match.com, Ask.com, CitySearch, Evite and Life123.com. He was a co-founder of Life123.com. Prior to IAC he had led the marketing operations team at Domania.com, an independent website purchased in 2002 by Primedia Corp and subsequently by LendingTree.com.

Deutsch is based at the Boston office and reports to Carol Helton, Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Marketing.

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The University of California Libraries will join with the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin and University of Florida in an initiative to identify and make available digital versions of "orphan works" within the holdings of the HathiTrust Digital Library.

HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. The majority of HathiTrust holdings are in-copyright works, of which an unknown but likely large proportion are so-called "orphans" - works whose owners cannot be identified or located. The University of California will join the effort to identify orphan works and publicise information about them in order to give rights holders an opportunity to claim them and make informed decisions about their availability within HathiTrust. It is said to be likely that many people with these rights wish to make the books fully viewable.

The majority of orphans probably are just that - lacking anyone to claim ownership. If the orphan works are not claimed by rights holders, the digital volumes will be made available in full view to HathiTrust partner library patrons if their libraries hold those works in their print collections.

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The British Library, the national library of the UK, has announced the appointment of Maja Maricevic as Head of Higher Education. In her new position, Maricevic will continue to develop the British Library's relationship with higher education institutions and related government and sector bodies.

She will work closely with the sector to ensure that the British Library's unique resources and services meet the needs of universities. The Library's relationship with the sector is crucial in ensuring that the UK research base retains and enhances its world-class reputation.

Maricevic has joined the British Library after three years as a higher education consultant at the PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, where she worked with universities and government departments on a variety of projects, ranging from policy development to operational and cost efficiency. She also led higher education policy and development work at the London Development Agency from 2004 to 2008, and previously was responsible for knowledge transfer and innovation at Middlesex University.

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The University of Florida (UF) George A. Smathers Libraries has joined the HathiTrust Digital Library, a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. There are more than fifty partners in the HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide. Currently, the HathiTrust has 8.9 million digitised volumes.

As a result of its participation in the HathiTrust, users of the UF Libraries will soon gain access to digital versions of some of the thousands of orphan works held in print by the UF Libraries that are also available in the HathiTrust Digital Library. These works will be fully searchable, viewable and accessible to UF students and faculty wherever there is a connection to the Internet. The print copy remains available if needed.

The UF Libraries join with the libraries at the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin in an initiative to identify orphan works and attempt to locate the 'parents.' The libraries will create a mechanism to publicise bibliographic information about the orphans to give their parents the opportunity to claim them and make informed decisions about the status of their work in the HathiTrust.

It is likely that the majority of orphans exist without a surviving person or entity to claim ownership. If owners do not come forward, the digital versions of these scholarly works will be made available through the HathiTrust and each library will provide its users with access to the ones that match its print holdings. Orphan works from the HathiTrust will be available to users of the UF Libraries later this year.

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The US' National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health, has announced the release of an extensive selection from the papers of surgeon Dr. Clarence Dennis on the Library's Profiles in Science website. Dr. Dennis (1909-2005) had developed one of the first heart-lung bypass machines.

With this addition, the number of prominent researchers, public health officials and promoters of medical research whose personal and professional records are presented on Profiles has grown to 32.

Best known as a surgeon and inventor, Dr. Dennis was also a dedicated medical educator and administrator whose trainees went on to expand the boundaries of the surgical treatment of heart disease. After 11 years on the surgical faculty at Minnesota, he chaired the department of surgery at the State University of New York's Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn from 1951 to 1971, building the department and developing residency and research programmes. He was an active member of many professional societies for much of his career, including the American College of Surgeons and the National Society for Medical Research. Working with such groups, he helped to set standards for surgical education and ethics, shape amendments to the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (to regulate the growing number of biomedical devices on the market), and defend the use of animals in medical research.

Profiles in Science features digitised correspondence, published articles, notebook excerpts, drafts of reports and photographs from the Clarence Dennis Papers at the National Library of Medicine.

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Lafayette has become the first liberal arts college to join HathiTrust, a cooperative of academic and research libraries seeking to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form. The College is also one of just four liberal arts institutions to approve an open access resolution which allows the public to view Lafayette faculty journal publications in a freely accessible, permanent digital repository.

Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership currently comprising 50 partners from the US and Europe. Partner libraries have already contributed more than eight million volumes to the digital library, pooled from content digitised by Google Books and the Internet Archive, as well as local digitisation efforts.

More than two million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the web. HathiTrust guarantees the long-term preservation of the materials it holds, providing the expert curation and consistent access long associated with research libraries.

As a HathiTrust partner, enhanced access will be available for Lafayette students, faculty, and staff with a Network ID and password. Enhanced access includes the ability to download complete PDFs of public domain books, the option to create and save collections of items in HathiTrust, and full text access for visually impaired users.

Lafayette's open access resolution puts the College at the forefront of the open access movement. Among liberal arts institutions, only Oberlin College, Trinity University, and Rollins College have adopted similar policies.

Under the resolution, faculty members grant the College permission to make the articles they author and co-author available through the Lafayette Digital Repository, as allowed by copyright agreements and unless that person chooses to opt out. The resolution, which was approved by the faculty in the spring, will take effect at the start of the 2011-12 academic year.

The repository already contains more than 150 faculty articles. It is indexed by all major Internet search engines, including Google, so results from these search engines can lead users directly to a relevant article in the repository.

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The University of Michigan Library (U-M Library) users will soon gain access to digital versions of some of the thousands of orphan works held in common by the U-M Library and the HathiTrust Digital Library. Making these works available in HathiTrust will render them fully searchable, viewable, and accessible to U-M researchers wherever there is a connection to the Internet.

This marks the next phase in the library's orphan works project, following last month's announcement that the MLibrary Copyright Office has begun identifying orphan works from among the millions of in-copyright digitised books in the HathiTrust Digital Library.

Making these orphan works accessible to the U-M community will reportedly begin to unlock that large portion of the 20th century scholarly and cultural digital record that is in copyright and unavailable because copyright holders cannot be found or contacted.

The library's intent is to foster these works and make them available so they can be used. Access to orphan works will be limited to U-M authenticated users and visitors to the campus libraries in Ann Arbor, and to works that the library holds in its print collection. In other words, the same population that can check out these works from the library's print collection now will be able to read the digital copies from other locations.

Other institutions among the HathiTrust's more than 50 partners, including the University of Wisconsin, are moving forward with similar plans to share digitised orphan works from their own collections. The orphan works identification activity is seen as an extension of the grant-funded Copyright Review Management System, which examines US works published during 1923-63 to determine whether they are in copyright. That work began at U-M, and now includes reviewers at Indiana University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Minnesota. Of the more than 135,000 volumes reviewed thus far, approximately 46 percent are in copyright.

The orphan works project begins with this 46 percent; and the task of identifying true orphan works from among millions of in-copyright volumes eventually will be shared by other HathiTrust partner institutions.

The identification work now is being carried out at U-M under the auspices of the MLibrary Copyright Office. The process is documented online at www.lib.umich.edu/orphan-works. Every prospective orphan work's bibliographic information will be listed in the HathiTrust Digital Library and on the MLibrary website for 90 days, after which, if no copyright holder emerges, it will be made accessible to U-M users.

The library expects that some of these works will be accessible to the U-M community by early October.

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The British Library has announced that the latest articles from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) are now available via its Document Supply service. The journal is reportedly among the most widely read and cited medical journals. Following a licence agreement signed with the British Library, the Library's Document Supply service is able to provide electronic articles from NEJM, from volume one in 1812 to the most recent issue.

The licence allows the Library to supply the journal's articles through its copyright fee paid service as well as under the fair dealing provision of the Copyright Act, to support education and learning. The articles are available online at www.bl.uk/articles.

Published by the Massachusetts Medical Society, NEJM (NEJM.org) aims to keep practising physicians abreast of the very latest developments in clinical research. It is said to have extensive readership internationally, and is reportedly cited in scientific literature more frequently than any other biomedical journal.

The British Library, the national library of the UK, seeks to provide world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities. It aims to offer unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. The Library's collection has developed over 250 years and exceeds 150 million separate items.

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Online reference service Credo Reference and STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, have signed an agreement that will put 45 health sciences titles in forthcoming Credo Reference Subject Collections.

Credo's Subject Collections, which launched with eight collections in spring 2011, are compilations of leading subject-specific reference curated with library professionals and available alone or alongside the Credo General Reference service. The Elsevier titles represent a wide variety of resources in the research areas of Health Science, Dentistry and Veterinary Medicine. The titles will be included in the Credo Subject Collections of Nursing and Allied Health and Veterinary Medicine.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo's General Reference service empowers librarians and effortlessly delivers authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Credo now offers Publisher and Subject Collections which offer libraries deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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The US' National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Agricultural Library (NAL) and the Library of Congress (LC) have announced an agreement for the implementation of Resource Description and Access (RDA), new cataloging rules published in June 2010 to replace Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, 2nd edition (AACR2).

Concerns were raised in 2008 about how well RDA met its own self-stated goals, the costs of adopting new rules, and the lack of clear explanations of the new rules' benefits. Therefore, the US community, led by the senior management at the NLM, the NAL, and the LC had agreed to coordinate a US test of the rules and make a joint decision about whether or not the rules should be adopted. The US RDA Test Coordinating Committee was appointed in June 2008, with three members each from NLM and NAL and four members from LC. The test involved 23 partner institutions (libraries of various sizes and types, museums, archives, vendors, educators and students), in addition to the three national libraries. The test was conducted from July-December 2010, the results of the test were analysed from January-May 2011. The Coordinating Committee submitted its report and recommendations to their senior management on June 6, 2011.

Executives of the three national libraries, Dr. Simon Liu (NAL), Sheldon Kotzin (NLM) and Dr. Deanna Marcum (LC), recently issued a statement endorsing the recommendations made by the US RDA Test Coordinating Committee regarding the implementation of RDA. The statement noted that RDA should be implemented no earlier than January 2013 and is contingent upon the satisfactory progress/completion of nine specified tasks and action items outlined in the report.

While the full report will be made available prior to the upcoming American Library Association (ALA) Annual Meeting, which begins June 23, 2011, the executive summary of the report is available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/cataloging/RDA_report_executive_summary.pdf

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The US' National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and three other institutions in Maryland are forming a new partnership. They will work together to enhance the training of librarians and improve the public's access to, and understanding of, health information.

Representatives from the NLM; the Health and Human Services Library at the University of Maryland at Baltimore; the University of Maryland at College Park; and the Universities at Shady Grove signed a memorandum of understanding that outlines their collaboration.

The partner institutions share an interest in health and medical education, advanced training, and information dissemination. They will develop and participate in curriculums and courses, training and internship opportunities, and other educational initiatives. They also will explore areas of mutual interest for research, and will develop initiatives to increase access to careers in medicine and health, with a particular interest in reaching students who are under-represented in the fields.

As an initial effort, the partners will work with the University of Maryland, College Park, College of Information Studies (iSchool) to design a specialisation in health sciences information for the iSchools Master of Library science programme to be offered by the iSchool at the Universities at Shady Grove. Additionally, they will assess the feasibility of a series of regular internship placements for iSchool students at the partner libraries and also identify areas of mutual interest for research or other collaboration.

The initiatives outlined in the agreement will be carried out to the extent funds are available. The partners will collaborate to secure external funding for the efforts where possible.

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Goportis - Leibniz Library Network for Research Information is organising the Digital Preservation Summit from October 19-20, 2011, in Hamburg. An international group of practitioners of digital preservation will be coming together to discuss concrete solutions for their daily work and share their knowledge and experiences in the field of digital preservation.

The first day of the conference is dedicated to the institutional and technical preparations for digital preservation. As a prelude to the conference presentations, Dr. Adam Farquar will give an overview on the necessary preparations and the often underestimated challenges regarding the digital preservation of objects. Dr. Farquar is the Head of Digital Library Technology at the British Library and founder of the Open Planets Foundation. His address will be followed by a presentation and discussion on a variety of examples from practice concerning choice and risk assessment of digital stocks.

The different expert presentations will be followed by a workshop session. Here the conference participants can ask questions concerning their research areas and find joint solutions.

The following day will be devoted to the Ingest process using examples from different digital collections. Prof. Seamus Ross, Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, will give an introduction to the topic. The following presentations will be on tools and the implementation of Ingest workflows for different types of material. The day will also focus on practical relevance and exchange of experiences.

The Digital Preservation Summit 2011 will conclude with a panel discussion with Twitterwall on the topic of organisation and infrastructure for digital preservation.

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Boston University Libraries has become the latest member of HathiTrust, a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in a digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form. The Libraries plan to contribute public domain volumes digitised through in-house projects and partnerships with the Internet Archive through the Boston Library Consortium.

As a trusted repository, HathiTrust guarantees the long-term preservation of the materials it holds, providing the expert curation and consistent access long associated with research libraries. Additionally, as a service for partners and a public good, HathiTrust also offers persistent access to the digital collections. This includes viewing, downloading, and searching access to public domain volumes, and searching access to in copyright volumes. Specialised features are also available which facilitate access by persons with print disabilities, and allow users to gather subsets of the digital library into 'collections' that can be searched and browsed.

Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership currently comprising more than fifty partners. In addition to providing access and preservation to a rapidly growing digital corpus, member libraries are engaged in projects to enhance access and usability. The University of Michigan has launched a project to identify 'orphan works' among the millions of volumes in the HathiTrust Digital Library. This is a step toward developing broader access to these copyrighted volumes whose copyright owners cannot be identified or found. Other projects include text-mining and enhanced metadata management.

Boston University Libraries will rely on HathiTrust as a key component of the Libraries' digital preservation efforts. This collaboration will enable the Libraries to both expand its digital collections and to assure durable access to its own digital assets.

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The US' National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has released 'Medicine in the Americas', a digital resource encompassing over 300 early American printed books. The resource makes freely available original works demonstrating the evolution of American medicine from colonial frontier outposts of the 17th century to research hospitals of the 20th century.

Drawing on the collections of NLM's History of Medicine Division and including works from the US, Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada, this initial release of Medicine in the Americas encompasses monographs dating from 1610 to 1865. Additional titles, dating up to 1920 and drawing further upon NLM's collection of early American printed books, will be available on an ongoing basis in the future.

Medicine in the Americas is expected to be of interest to scholars, educators, writers, students and others who wish to use primary historical materials to help expand knowledge of medical and public health history for the advancement of scholarship across the disciplines and for the education of the general public.

Digital files created for Medicine in the Americas reside in NLM's 'Digital Collections,' a repository for access to and preservation of digitised biomedical resources. Digital Collections allows rich searching, browsing and retrieval of monographs and films from NLM's History of Medicine Division. Medicine in the Americas joins the recently launched collection, "The Public Health Film Goes to War," as well as other digital resources, the digital files for which also reside in Digital Collections.

Medicine in the Americas is reportedly made possible in part through the participation of the NLM in the Medical Heritage Library, a digital curation collaborative supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and administered by the Open Knowledge Commons.

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The National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the National Institutes of Health, has awarded new five-year contracts to eight institutions to serve as Regional Medical Libraries (RMLs) in the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM). The NN/LM consists of the eight competitively selected Regional Medical Libraries, and over 6,000 health sciences and public libraries.

Since its original authorisation by Congress in the 1965 Medical Library Assistance Act, the NN/LM has worked to equalise and enhance access to health sciences information throughout the United States. It seeks to advance the progress of medicine and improve the public health by providing health professionals and the general public with equal access to biomedical information.

The goals of the 2011-2016 contracts are to develop collaborations among Network members and other organisations to improve access to and sharing of biomedical information resources throughout the nation; to promote awareness of, access to, and use of biomedical information resources for health professionals and the public, with a particular emphasis on contributing to Healthy People 2020; and to develop, promote, and improve electronic access to health information by Network members, health professionals, and organizations providing health information to the public.

The RMLs and NN/LM member libraries are vital to NLM's outreach efforts to health professionals and consumers to increase awareness, facilitate access, and provide training in the use of NLM's many Web-based information services. These include: MEDLINE/PubMed, a database of more than 20 million citations to biomedical journal articles; MedlinePlus, a consumer health information service, which provides access to full-text information produced by the National Institutes of Health and other authoritative sources; and ClinicalTrials.gov, which provides current information about clinical research studies.

The Regional Medical Libraries also exhibit and demonstrate NLM's products and services at national, regional, state, and local health professional and consumer-oriented meetings; provide training and consultations; coordinate the basic Network services such as interlibrary loan; and work to improve the supporting infrastructure for health sciences libraries. Although NN/LM programmes have historically been implemented on a regional basis, the new contracts will continue to provide opportunities for cross-regional and national collaborations.

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The British Library and the BFI, the lead body for film in the UK, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), with the objective of increasing public, professional and research access to audiovisual and broadcast content and integrating it with other knowledge collections. Signed by BFI Director, Amanda Nevill, and British Library CEO, Dame Lynne Brindley, the MOU outlines key areas for joint strategic thinking, including public access, rights management and digitisation.

Managed by a joint steering committee, this new partnership will look at ways the UK’s leading custodians of the nation’s audiovisual and broadcast heritage can meet the challenges of collecting, preserving and providing contemporary and long term access to their unique collections in the digital age, for the benefit of research and the wider public.

Both organisations aim to explore areas such as collecting policies; contributing to IPR and copyright discussions; metadata and resource discovery; how new digital technologies and enhanced physical spaces can improve access to film and television content; digital and paper conservation; exhibitions and public programmes; and how both institutions can offer services for the creative industries. More specific details will be developed at a strategic summit in early spring.

The MOU signed by both parties is non exclusive. Both the BFI and the British Library intend that this partnership will evolve as a model of best practice and in time would seek the opportunity to work with other public archives throughout the UK to expand the project. It complements the MOUs signed between the BBC and BFI in 2009 and between the BBC and the British Library in 2009.

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The Legal Deposit Libraries have welcomed the Government's response to public consultation on the 'draft regulations and guidance for non-print legal deposit' and its commitment to deliver regulations for non-print content. The Legal Deposit Libraries comprise The British Library, The National Library of Scotland, The National Library of Wales, Bodleian Library Oxford, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin.

In particular, the Legal Deposit Libraries welcome the Government's move to regulate on the deposit of works on CD-ROM and other offline media; the harvesting of online content, which will allow a great deal of material and most UK websites to be archived and thus avoid a digital black hole; and agreements with publishers for depositing the published digital equivalent of printed works in place of depositing the printed version. This, in the long term, is expected to help the Legal Deposit Libraries and the publishing sector to reduce costs.

The Libraries will work with the Government and the publishing industry to achieve these aims as well as provide any additional information required to ensure the success of these regulations. In addition, the Libraries will work with the publishing industry to resolve any technical concerns and identify the true costs and public benefit of regulating on other methods of delivery. It is hoped that it will be possible to extend the regulations to cover such methods within a few years.

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HathiTrust, a partnership of major research institutions and libraries, has been certified as a trustworthy digital repository by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) through their rigorous Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC) assessment programme. Only a small number of digital repositories have been granted this certification.

The in-depth preservation audit of HathiTrust began in November 2009 and was completed in December 2010. Certification is based on criteria from the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification: Criteria and Checklist (TRAC), as well as additional criteria developed by CRL. The certification was guided by an advisory panel consisting of leaders from the CRL community in collection development, library administration, and digital technology.

The audit encompassed an extensive review of data and documentation provided by HathiTrust, conversations with key HathiTrust staff, and a site visit performed by CRL in May 2010. The full audit report is available on the CRL website. Documentation of HathiTrust's compliance with TRAC can be found at http://www.hathitrust.org/trac.

This certification represents a major achievement for the partnership, which has defined itself by the transparency of its operations, the openness of its systems and services, and its reliance on broadly accepted standards and best practices for archiving and preserving digital content.

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Online reference service Credo Reference has announced the launch of a new online community, Libraries Thriving, a space dedicated to communicating the value of libraries and their ability to impact the learning moment. Libraries Thriving facilitates collaboration on the innovative use of e-resources and is free to all members of the educational community - librarians, educators, researchers, publishers and library vendors.

To address challenges in the current climate, Libraries Thriving offers an Editor-led Discussion Forum, which covers diverse topics such as 'Marketing your Library,' 'Information Literacy for First-Year Students,' 'Libguides and Subject Guides' and others. An international group of librarians, faculty and IT staff engage on key educational technology issues and share their case studies. The online community also provides an Online Seminar series which will highlight educational discussions covering key technical issues limiting progress in libraries.

The next Libraries Thriving online seminar, 'Information Literacy and the Oprah Effect,' is scheduled for April 7 and 21. Pete Ciuffetti, Credo Reference Director of Library Innovation, will share ideas for promotion of authoritative e-resources.

The online community is one piece of a larger Libraries Thriving initiative at Credo Reference which aims to help librarians share a positive vision of their future role in information discovery and delivery and to provide the tools, resources and support for the collective achievement of this vision.

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The National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health, has announced the launch of the Environmental Health Student Portal. Created by the Specialized Information Services Division, this website introduces middle school students to environmental health science within the context of current middle school science curriculum standards.

This latest edition to the family of NLM resources for students is a free, non-subscription-based website that contains links to government and other reviewed and selected sites. It seeks to provide a safe and reliable environment for teachers and students to study topics such as water pollution, climate change, chemicals and air pollution, and their impact on health.

Middle school teachers from school systems in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Maine and the District of Columbia participated in focus groups to determine the need for an environmental health site, the content, including topics and subtopics covered, and ways in which they can incorporate the use of the website into their classrooms.

Topics and subtopics highlighted on the website come directly from the data collected during this research. The Environmental Health Student Portal allows students to conduct research, play games related to environmental health, locate science fair projects, and view videos. Teachers can use the site to locate links to relevant content and lesson plans from resources like the US Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Environmental Health Science.

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The year 2011 marks the 175th anniversary of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health. Claimed to be the world's largest medical library and the producer of electronic information resources used by millions of people every day, NLM has changed the way scientific and medical information is organised, stored, accessed, and disseminated. From its founding in 1836, NLM's hallmark has been information innovation, leading to exciting scientific discoveries that ultimately improve the public health.

The Library has planned a number of special programmes in support of its mission. These include a disaster information outreach symposium, March 29-30 (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/disaster_info_symposium.html); a workshop on long-term preservation and management of electronic health records, April 6-7 (http://ddpehr.nist.gov/home.php); and a symposium on the future of clinical trials, June 6-7, among others.

NLM has made it easy to find and search the biomedical literature. The medical library established librarian training programmes and the National Network of Libraries of Medicine in the late 1960s to equalise access to the biomedical literature across the country. Now with nearly 6,000 members, NLM and this network of academic, hospital, and public libraries partner with community-based organisations to bring high-quality information services to health professionals and the public.

NLM began intensive development of Web health information services for the general public in 1998 with the release of MedlinePlus.gov. Now available in English and Spanish, MedlinePlus is one of many NLM consumer health information products also available on mobile devices such as smartphones. In 2000, it released ClinicalTrials.gov, which now claims to be the world's largest source of information about clinical trials recruiting for patients and healthy volunteers, and also provides summary results of some trials long before they appear in the published literature.

NLM has a state-of-the-art data center, to ensure uninterrupted access to essential information services that are accessed billions of times each year. This center has maximised the utilisation of available computing resources by introducing centralised shared data storage, energy efficiency initiatives, and the establishment of an offsite redundant data center for disaster recovery. More details on NLM's history, its programmes and services, and its anniversary year calendar, is available online at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/175.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has announced that a new Publisher Collection from Hodder Arnold, in partnership with the ASM Press (American Society for Microbiology) is now live and available for institutional access. The Kucers' the Use of Antibiotics Collection is being offered for subscription or perpetual purchase.

Extensively covering the treatment of infectious diseases, Kucers' the Use of Antibiotics claims to be a leading reference work in this vast and rapidly developing field. The Sixth Edition offers essential information on all new and existing therapies, as well as emerging drugs that are not yet fully licensed. Researchers can access the four content sections - antibiotics, anti-fungal drugs, anti-parasitic drugs and anti-viral drugs - to check for susceptibility, formulations and dosing (adult and paediatric), pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, toxicity and drug distribution, along with clinical uses.

ASM Press and Credo Reference are partnering to jointly promote the institutional version of this medical Collection. Free trials and more information are available from both organisations.

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Wrox Press, an imprint of Wiley, has announced an agreement with Safari Books Online to publish Wrox Press books in the Safari Books Online library. Safari Books Online is an on-demand digital library for technology, digital media and business professionals.

With this new agreement, programmers and administrators who subscribe to Safari Books Online will now be able to search for key words as well as read the full text of Wrox technology books online with all the features Safari Books Online offers (notes, tags and bookmarks)

Effective immediately, nineteen Wrox books, including popular titles such as Professional WordPress: Design and Development and Professional iPhone and iPad Database Application Programming, are available on the service. A total of 307 Wrox Press titles will be available, including all of the recent front-list titles, with additional new titles added as they are published in the near future.

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The British Library has launched its new strategy, setting out how it plans to develop its collections and services over the next four years.

Growing Knowledge: The British Library's Strategy 2011-2015 outlines the UK national library's key objectives and strategic priorities to the middle of the decade, and emphasises the need to deliver more for less in a challenging economic climate.

The new strategy follows the publication last September of the Library's 2020 Vision, which highlighted the key trends and opportunities for the next decade. The 2020 Vision was based upon twelve months of extensive research and consultation. It presented five themes that would help deliver the Library's ten-year vision of becoming a leading hub in the global information network, advancing knowledge through its collections, expertise and partnerships, for the benefit of the economy and society and the enrichment of cultural life.

The Library's strategy for 2011-2015 contains five strategic priorities, based on the 2020 Vision's themes. These include guarantee access for future generations; enable access for everyone who wants to do research; support research communities in key areas for social and economic benefit; enrich the cultural life of the nation; and lead and collaborate in growing the world's knowledge base.

Although operating with reduced operational and capital budgets, the Library will deliver a range of key objectives during the period covered. It will open a state-of-the-art Newspaper Storage Building; digitise up to 20 million pages from the national newspaper collection in partnership with brightsolid; and develop selected collaborative stewardship arrangements to collect and connect to content.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has signed an agreement to expand their Wiley-Blackwell Psychology Collection. The Publisher Collection, which now contains seventeen titles, including the recently published Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology (Fourth Edition), is available for perpetual purchase or annual subscription on the acclaimed Credo Reference platform.

Publisher Collections are available to libraries by subscription or perpetual purchase. Credo Reference's user-friendly platform provides a fresh way for reference publishers to present their content to researchers worldwide. Like all Credo Reference Publisher Collections, the Wiley-Blackwell Psychology Collection is available standalone or alongside a subscription to Credo General Reference.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo's General Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Credo Publisher Collections allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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The British Library has released initial findings from the first interim evaluation report of its exhibition, Growing Knowledge, the Evolution of Research - www.bl.uk/growingknowledge. The move is part of BL's ongoing discussion with its readers on how research is changing and their expectations of the future role of libraries.

Part of a broader evaluation study funded by JISC, initial findings developed by University College London (UCL)'s Ciber Research Group show that visitors to Growing Knowledge are interested in the initiative. Also, they are impressed that the Library is attempting to learn from and meet the needs of its researchers.

Specifically, visitors to the exhibition are impressed by the resources and tools on show and their usefulness to the research process. Findings show that visitors are rating the applications on show as 'very useful' or 'possibly useful'. For instance, 68 percent of visitors surveyed found the UK Web Archive very or possibly useful, whilst 50 percent said the same of the Mendeley tool.

Mendeley, which caught the attention of many visitors to the Interactive Research Pod content of the exhibition, was praised for meeting the requirements of researchers, such as organising disparate papers. It was also appreciated for providing an Amazon-style facility whereby users can see what others with similar research interests are doing; synchronising itself with other reference management software; and including a web archive system and generating bibliographies and indexes from papers being written.

The research also shows that the exhibition has shifted perceptions and provided researchers with food for thought in terms of tools and applications they might not previously have considered. Examining some of the key applications such as Visualisation Tools and Audio Search, 58 percent and 63 percent of visitors surveyed stated that they are not using these features currently but may do so in the future.

Showcasing highlights such as Microsoft's Surface Table and Haworth and HP's Interactive Research Pods, visitors were reportedly impressed with the layout and physical navigation of the digital multi-media environment. About 79 percent of the visitors found the exhibition 'innovative' or 'very innovative'.

Growing Knowledge is also seen to have attracted a diverse audience. Over half of the visitors to the exhibition have been over 40, suggesting that digital technology and research is not only the province of the young. Further, the exhibition has reached a large percentage of visitors who are not registered Library Readers.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has announced that it is offering libraries 28 Publisher Collections from 11 key reference publishers, with additional Publisher Collections planned for 2011. The move comes just over a year after the launch of the Publisher Collections offering.

Publisher Collections are available to libraries by subscription or perpetual purchase. Credo Reference's user-friendly platform provides a fresh way for reference publishers to present their content to researchers worldwide.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo's General Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Credo Publisher Collections allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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Online reference library Credo Reference is offering library professionals a new Online Seminar Series to address, and encourage discussion around, the issues facing libraries and librarians. The initiative is in response to the ongoing demand for innovative enhancements to library services.

Each month, librarians can choose one of two dates to participate in the month's seminar. Librarians can get additional information and sign up at http://www.librariesthriving.org. Seminar Speaker Peter Ciuffetti, Director of Library Solutions for Credo Reference, will cover will explore and analyse cases where libraries are innovating despite an uncertain budgetary climate at the 'Innovating on a Budget' seminar, scheduled for February 1, 3PM GMT. Participants can get to learn more about how open source, cloud computing and community cooperation are changing libraries today.

With this new programme, Credo Reference seeks to provide support for libraries and librarians world-wide. According Mike Sweet, Credo Reference CEO, participating in these seminars will provide librarians with practical ideas and tools to truly impact their library in these challenging times.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo's General Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Credo Publisher Collections allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has announced that it has now enabled access to databases from H.W. Wilson, the reference publisher that has been providing key resources to researchers for more than 112 years. Mutual customers of Credo Reference and WilsonWeb will now be able to link to the WilsonWeb databases from Credo Topic Pages via a Z39.50 search.

The range of H.W. Wilson's reference databases, covering a wide variety of subject disciplines with indexing of periodicals, books and biographies, can now be integrated with Credo Topic Pages, designed to provide contextualised, orderly access to authoritative content. Each of the approximately 9,000 Credo Topic Pages is a starting point that assembles topical material from resources within and outside the library. Libraries that include the additional content will now see their subscription to WilsonWeb collections on the Topic Pages.

H.W. Wilson publishes reference works delivered through WilsonWeb, its Internet-based information retrieval and organisation system offering a user-friendly interface and features designed specifically with the search needs of library patrons and staff in mind.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo's General Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Credo Publisher Collections allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has announced the appointment of Carol Helton as Vice President of Worldwide Sales. She will be based at the Boston office.

Helton has an extensive background in the information and software industries, including seven years at Wolters Kluwer, where she led sales efforts in three of its four health business units, and ultimately served as Vice President of Sales, Clinical Solutions. She has also held executive level sales positions at MEDecision and most recently at ZeOmega.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo's General Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Credo Publisher Collections allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, and the HathiTrust have developed a unique WorldCat Local user interface for discovery of items accessible through the HathiTrust Digital Library. HathiTrust is a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form.

The WorldCat Local prototype (http://hathitrust.worldcat.org) for the HathiTrust Digital Library was designed and implemented by both organisations in close cooperation as a means to further develop a shared digital library infrastructure. The WorldCat Local interface for the HathiTrust Digital Library is based on the WorldCat database, and will run along with the current HathiTrust catalogue during the prototype testing period.

As a digital repository for the nation's great research libraries, the HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the massive digitised collections of partner institutions. It offers libraries a means to archive and provide access to their digital content, whether scanned volumes, special collections, or born-digital materials. The representation of these resources in digital form offers expanded opportunities for innovative use in research, teaching and learning.

OCLC and HathiTrust have been working together to increase online visibility and accessibility of the digital collections by creating WorldCat records describing the content and linking to the collections via WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local. The creation of the unique public interface through WorldCat Local is seen to be the next step to offer enhanced access to this vital collection.

HathiTrust Digital Library records are discoverable through the separate WorldCat Local interface, as well as through WorldCat.org.

OCLC and HathiTrust are seeking feedback from users of the new HathiTrust public interface through WorldCat Local. Feedback from the user community and usability assessments will inform future development of the HathiTrust Digital Library catalogue.

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Twenty public libraries in North Carolina have reportedly formed a consortium to offer members a digital library.

With the growing number of eReader owners, the library is offering a series of free workshops to teach patrons how to download eBooks using the library's free, online collection through North Carolina Digital Library.

According to Deborah Wadleigh, the library's technical services manager, workshop attendees will learn what they need to get started - how to search for titles, download to personal computers and transfer to eReader and other digital devices. Amazon Kindles, however, are not compatible with North Carolina Digital Library, she added.

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The National Library of Australia recently released social media guidelines to provide clarity to employees on how to conduct themselves in the emerging world of social media.

The Library embraces the use of social media as a corporate communications and community-building tool. It encourages every employee to have an opportunity to express and communicate online in many ways, such as through social media, professional networking sites, blogs, and personal web sites. However, all employees need to use good judgment about what material appears online and in what context.

The aim of these guidelines is to encourage employees to find a voice in social media, but at the same time protect the interests of the Library. It also informs Library employees of their responsibilities when using social media.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has signed an agreement with information resources and technologies provider ProQuest to integrate The Annual Register into the Credo General Reference service. This will be the first ProQuest reference source available on the Credo Reference platform.

The Annual Register is a complete and detailed chronicle of events published each year since 1758. It is projected as an essential resource covering everything from world politics to society weddings, the latest scientific discoveries to the weather, and the year's best-selling novels to obituaries of authors and other public figures. This content will now be available on the Credo Reference platform.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo's General Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Credo Publisher Collections allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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Behaviour and morals online will be discussed at a workshop on Ethics and the World Wide Web as part of the British Library's Growing Knowledge exhibition. The workshop will be held at the Foyle Centre in the British Library on December 2, 2010.

Co-sponsored by The Web Science Trust, the seminar will focus on the fact that although the World Wide Web is the most complex piece of technology ever engineered and has transformed almost every aspect of everyday life, little is known about appropriate ethical behaviour online. The event will seek to improve understanding of what that stronger ethic will need to be.

To explore these issues, the workshop has invited keynote speeches, panel discussions and debate with an invited audience of practising engineers, academic researchers and philosophers. The keynote speakers are: Kieron O'Hara from the Web Science Trust, Luciano Floridi for the University of Hertfordshire/University of Oxford and Jeroen van den Hoven from the Delft University of Technology. The panel will include Martin Moore (Media Standards Trust); Nigel Shadbolt (University of Southampton); Yorick Wilks (Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition/University of Oxford); and David Wright (Trilateral Research)

Growing Knowledge – the Evolution of Research (12 October 2010 – 16 July 2011) showcases some never-seen-before research tools, thought-provoking content and futuristic design in a fully interactive research environment. The exhibition aims to challenge audiences on how research is changing and ask what they want to experience from the library of the future. The British Library has worked closely with Researcher in Residence, Aleks Krotoski to ensure that visitors will not only experience an exhibition not seen before at the Library but also engage with the ongoing debate about the usefulness of these technologies in tomorrow's knowledge environment.

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The Johns Hopkins University Libraries have become the latest member of HathiTrust, a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form.

Johns Hopkins' initial role as part of HathiTrust will center on the development of infrastructure, such as storage systems, and services that will allow for seamless integration with the university's library catalogue.

Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership that currently comprises more than two dozen partners. Over the last two years, the partners have contributed more than 7 million volumes to the digital library, digitised from their library collections through various means, including Google and Internet Archive digitisation and in-house initiatives. More than 1.6 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the Web.

HathiTrust serves a dual role. As a trusted repository, it guarantees the long-term preservation of the materials it holds, providing the expert curation and consistent access long associated with research libraries. As a service for partners, HathiTrust offers persistent access to the digital collections. This includes viewing, downloading and searching access to public domain volumes, and searching access to in-copyright volumes. Also, specialised features are available to facilitate access by people with print disabilities and to allow users to gather subsets of the digital library into 'collections' that can be searched and browsed.

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The British Library, the national library of the UK, has announced the appointment of Caroline Brazier as the Library's new Director of Scholarship and Collections. She will be a member of the Library's Executive Team and will report to Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive British Library. Caroline will take over from Phil Spence, who will continue as Director of Operations and Services.

As Director of Scholarship & Collections, Caroline will be charged with developing a roadmap for the Directorate in the light of increased digitisation of collections and non print legal deposit legislation. This will include developing a strategy for digital scholarship, to ensure that the Library delivers the right content and services for all researchers now and in the future; reviewing the Library's collection strategy and continuing to develop the capability and skills of Directorate staff to deliver services in an increasingly digital research environment. Caroline will start her role in April 2011.

Caroline will move to Scholarship and Collections from her current role as Associate Director of Operations and Services. Based in Boston Spa, Yorkshire, she is responsible for developing the service strategy and operational performance for the Library's Document Supply Service and also for contemporary acquisition and processing activities.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has signed an agreement to integrate a key I.B. Tauris title into the Credo General Reference service. Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Ideas is the first title from I.B. Tauris to be added to the Credo platform under this agreement.

I.B.Tauris is an independent publisher that seeks to bridge the gap between trade publishers and university presses. Cultural Geography: A Critical Dictionary of Key Ideas provides students and lecturers with an aid to understanding the complexities and subtleties of contemporary geography.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo's General Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Credo Publisher Collections allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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The Baylor University Libraries have joined the Library of Congress and a group of more than 50 leading research universities in a partnership with HathiTrust, a collaborative digital archive initiative that will enhance research resources available to the Baylor community.

HathiTrust was established in 2008 when the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the libraries of the University of California system and the University of Virginia established a repository to archive and share digital collections. The HathiTrust Digital Library already includes more than 7.2 million volumes digitised by Google, Microsoft, partner libraries and other organisations. The collection will continue to expand as member institutions add their digital collections to the repository.

HathiTrust seeks to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form. By virtue of the Baylor University Libraries entering into this international collaborative digitisation effort during the first wave of HathiTrust's expansion, they will participate in a 'constitutional convention' in 2011 to define the next phase of governance of this effort and shape future directions for the partnership of HathiTrust members.

The Baylor University Libraries connect people with ideas in support of teaching, learning, scholarship and academic distinction. Its central libraries (Moody Memorial and Jesse H. Jones) and special collections libraries (Armstrong Browning Library, The Texas Collection and W.R. Poage Legislative Library) are home to nearly 2.5 million volumes, more than 60,000 serials, and more than 500,000 e-books, e-journals, digital collections and other online research resources.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has announced that it has expanded its agreement with the Berkshire Publishing Group. Five major Berkshire resources - 31 acclaimed volumes in all - will be available for the first time through the Credo Publisher Collection service.

Berkshire Publishing specialises in international relations, cross-cultural communication, global business and economic information, and environmental sustainability. The company works with an international network of over 10,000 experts to develop publications that are used by students, teachers, scholars, journalists, policy makers, and professionals around the globe.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo's General Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Publisher Collections allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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Safari Books Online, a US-based e-reference joint venture between publishers O'Reilly Media, Inc. and Pearson Technology Group, has announced that it is offering a free app for Apple's iPad which allows subscribers of Safari Books Online to view book content in their library. Subscribers will also be able to view content offline. The free app, called Safari To Go, is available for download now at Apple's iTunes App Store.

Safari Books Online is already available for iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry and Android smartphones on its mobile site, m.safaribooksonline.com. It built the new Safari To Go app from the ground up specifically to leverage iPad capabilities such as pinch-to-zoom and drag and drop functions.

The Safari To Go iPad app includes search technology to help users find exactly what they need by searching the vast collection of books and articles available. Users can also search within the content of a book to pinpoint specific information quickly. Also, it helps users navigate quickly and easily via a simplified, touch screen interface, optimised for iPad users and designed to allow users to quickly start where they left off and spend more time reading and less time searching. Additionally, users can sign up for trials and subscriptions from the application; access the sample content of each book (for non subscribers); gain access to folders and notes with tagging and bookmarking of book content synchronised between the app and the full website; and cache book content to the iPad for offline reading.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has signed an agreement with Johns Hopkins University Press to integrate the latter’s Encyclopedia of American Studies (EAS) into the Credo General Reference service. With this agreement Johns Hopkins University Press joins a growing list of university presses that have chosen to make their reference content available on the Credo Reference platform.

The Encyclopedia of American Studies was first published as a four-volume print edition for scholars and college, graduate and high school students. Offering more than 700 articles and biographies (with accompanying bibliographies), the EAS supports research and study in a wide range of disciplines related to the history and cultures of the US - from pre-colonial days to the present.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo’s General Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Publisher Collections allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has announced a new partnership with the Northeast Research Libraries consortium (NERL) to provide member libraries with access to Credo’s General Reference and Publisher and Subject Collections services at a discount.

The Northeast Research Libraries Consortium was organised in 1996 to jointly license and deploy significant files or collections of electronic materials. Anchored at Yale University, the NERL member institutions are all members of the Association of Research Libraries, an organisation composed of the principal research libraries in the US and Canada. With this new agreement, students and faculty at participating libraries can access a collection of highly regarded reference titles, selected by the library to meet the needs of their institution.

The University of Maryland was among the first group of institutions to take advantage of the NERL discount, selecting both the Publisher Collection and the General Reference services.

The Northeast Research Libraries consortium core membership comprises 28 academic research libraries with the common objectives of access and cost containment, joint licensing, and possible joint deployment of electronic resources. NERL also offers a forum in which members can share information about management and budgeting for electronic resources.

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The National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the US' National Institutes of Health, has announced the redesign of two of its Web resources - the Disaster Information Management Research Center (DIMRC) and National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) Emergency Preparedness & Response Toolkit. Web pages of the DIMRC now have a new look, as does the site for the NN/LM Emergency Preparedness & Response Toolkit.

The DIMRC redesign enhances access to NLM's many diverse resources, which are useful for disaster and emergency readiness, response, and recovery. Emergency responders will find links to the Wireless Information System for Emergency Responders (WISER) resource for hazardous materials incidents and the Radiation Emergency Medical Management (REMM) site. A growing list of guides to online disaster information includes titles such as Crude Oil Spills and Health, Special Populations: Emergency and Disaster Preparedness, and Floods. New features include an A to Z Index, links to the latest articles and reports from PubMed and the Resource Guide for Public Health Preparedness, and news about disaster events, publications, and online resources from both US and international sources. The Center is a part of the Specialized Information Services Division at NLM.

The site for the NN/LM Emergency Preparedness & Response Toolkit now features a cleaner presentation of information and resources, and Twitter feeds and easier access to weather-related alerts and warnings. A new video tutorial (http://nnlm.gov/ep/toolkit-navigation-video) assists users in navigating the toolkit. The NN/LM provides the Toolkit for librarians to use in developing emergency preparedness and response plans for their libraries and finding help with handling floods, fires and other incidents that affect a library's buildings, collections and services.

The National Network, a service of the National Library of Medicine, coordinates eight regional offices and a network of nearly 6,000 member libraries in the United States. The Toolkit Web site is managed by the University of Virginia Claude Moore Health Sciences Library.

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Cornell University Library, one of the leading academic research libraries in the US, has become the latest member of HathiTrust, a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in a digital library initiative.

Cornell's library will deposit 300,000 digital books into HathiTrust by March 2011. In return, HathiTrust will ensure the long-term preservation of the materials. It will also make public-domain materials available and offer enhanced services, such as access for people with print disabilities.

HathiTrust seeks to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form. More than two dozen institutions participate in the repository, including Columbia University (Cornell's 2CUL partner), the entire University of California system and the New York Public Library. Founded in 2008, HathiTrust guarantees the long-term preservation of materials it holds and offers consistent access to the digital collections.

More than 1.5 million of HathiTrust's volumes are in the public domain and freely available on the Web. The growing repository contains nearly 7 million volumes of both copyright and public-domain materials, many of which were digitised through the Google and Internet Archive programmes.

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The National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the US' National Institutes of Health, has launched a new digital repository, Digital Collections, at http://collections.nlm.nih.gov. The new resource is complementary to the PubMed Central digital archive of electronic journal articles (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/). The repository is projected to allow rich searching, browsing and retrieval of monographs and films from NLM's History of Medicine Division. Additional content and other format types will be added over time. Users can perform full-text and keyword searching within each collection or across the entire repository.

This first release of Digital Collections includes a newly expanded set of Cholera Online monographs, a portion of which NLM first published online in PDF format in 2007. The version of Cholera Online now available via Digital Collections includes 518 books (dating from 1817 to 1900) about cholera pandemics of that period. More information about the selection of the books and the subject of cholera may be found on the original Cholera Online web page at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/cholera/. Each book was scanned into high-quality TIFF images, which underwent optical character recognition to generate corresponding text files. Finally, a JPEG2000 derivative was created for each page for presentation through the integrated book viewer, which includes a Flash-based zooming feature for resizing and rotating a page on demand.

The second collection is a selection of 11 historical films, all created by the US government and in the public domain. The films have been digitised in a variety of video formats, to accommodate a wide range of playback devices, including mobile devices. Digital Collections also includes an integrated, Flash-based video player which allows full-text search of a film's transcript and graphically displays where the searched word or phrase occurs within the timeline of the film.

Every page of each book and every video is stored as a discrete object in Digital Collections, with an XML 'glue' describing each object and relationships between objects. To ensure long-term integrity of these digital files, checksums (number strings which act like mathematical "fingerprints") are calculated and written into the objects as the objects are ingested into Digital Collections. These checksums will be re-calculated periodically and compared with the original values. Additionally, all ingested files are versioned, so that any changes do not overwrite the original but instead create a new, second file which is stored along with the first.

Digital Collections was built using several open-source components, with the Fedora Commons Repository Software providing the foundation. The primary browse and search interface has been adapted from the Muradora 'front-end' for Fedora, created by Macquarie University in Sydney.

In 2009, NLM began a pilot project to build the repository, develop appropriate workflows for ingesting and managing the content, and provide a core set of end-user services suitable for general public access. Information on the year-long evaluation process leading to the selection of Fedora can be found at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/digitalrepository/index.html.

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The British Library, the national library of the United Kingdom, has announced the launch of its 2020 Vision, which sets out the library's priorities and aspirations for the next decade. The vision highlights what are likely to be the key trends and opportunities over the next ten years, indicating how the British Library plans to take advantage of those opportunities to remain a major hub of the global information network. Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, announced the vision during her keynote speech at the Independent Woodstock Literary Festival.

The vision outlines five key themes that set out the priorities for the British Library: to guarantee access for future generations; to enable access for everyone who wants to do research; to support research communities in key areas for social and economic benefit; to enrich the cultural life of the nation; and to lead and collaborate in growing the world's knowledge base. The website at www.bl.uk/2020vision features the full text of the vision, along with a video foreword by Dame Lynne Brindley and illustrative video clips for each of the key themes. It also links to the discussion documents, reports by Library specialists and detailed methodologies that underpin the 2020 Vision.

The experts consulted by the Library provided a range of views on what the world of 2020 would look like. According to Dame Lynne, only 25 percent of all titles worldwide will be published in print form alone by the year 2020. Seventy-five percent will only be published digitally, or in both digital and print form. She further noted that as use of mobile devices become ubiquitous, users will expect seamless access to information and services, and will assume that everything is available on the web.

The 2020 Vision website encourages visitors to offer their feedback on the Library's plans, and also join the debate via Twitter (hashtag: #BL2020vision).

As the national library of the UK, the British Library seeks to provide world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. The British Library's collections include 150 million items from every era of written human history beginning with Chinese oracle bones dating from 300 BC, right up to the latest e-journals.

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British Library, the national library of the United Kingdom, has opened its revamped and expanded Learning Centre, the Harry M Weinrebe Learning Centre. Funded entirely through private donations, the Learning Centre offers pupils and teachers cutting-edge facilities to support digital literacy skills as well as first-hand encounters with historic manuscripts, sound recordings, maps and letters.

According to the British Library, the Harry M Weinrebe Learning Centre provides a bright, spacious and inspiring space in which young learners will be able to explore the Library's collections and develop their digital research skills. The £500,000 project was funded by donations from the Dorset Foundation, the Wolfson Foundation, John Lyon's Charity, British Library Patrons and others. Construction and refurbishment work took place during the summer with minimal disruption to the Learning programme.

Around 17,000 young learners and 3,000 teachers, adult learners and family groups take part in the British Library's Learning Programme every year, which is aimed mainly at secondary school pupils (aged 11-19) but also caters for younger and older groups. Through workshops, curator talks and tours, learners explore primary sources such as historic newspapers, diaries, manuscripts, sound recordings and maps.

The Learning Centre is fully digitally-enabled, with laptops for every pupil, electronic whiteboards, state of the art audio-visual facilities and - for the first time - video-conferencing facilities and remote viewing equipment, which will allow workshops and curator talks using collection items to be offered to similarly-equipped schools anywhere in the country.

School groups will be using the Learning Centre from next week and an extensive programme of workshops and study sessions is planned for the Library's forthcoming major exhibition on the English language, Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices, which opens on November 12.

As the national library of the UK, the British Library seeks to provide world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offers unparalleled access to the world's largest and most comprehensive research collection. The British Library's collections include 150 million items from every era of written human history beginning with Chinese oracle bones dating from 300 BC, right up to the latest e-journals.

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The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has announced that it has opened its Applied Engineering and Technology (AET) Library, projected as the US' first completely bookless brick-and-mortar library on a college or university campus. The 80-person capacity library, which caters to UTSA's College of Sciences and College of Engineering students, is a satellite to the university's larger John Peace Library.

Electronic research is stated to be central to UTSA's AET Library. Instead of storing printed volumes, the library offers students a collection of electronic resources including 425,000 e-books and 18,000 e-journal subscriptions. Skilled science and engineering librarians are available during library hours to help students who need research assistance.

UTSA's electronic library is said to be quickly catching on with students, who are finding that library staff is more available to assist them now that it does not have to circulate and re-shelf books. The publications students want to read are also more accessible, because the online format allows many students to simultaneously access the same volume.

The trend to move higher education library collections online began in October 2000, when Kansas State University opened its Fiedler Engineering Library. The branch library's collection is completely electronic, with the exception of a series of reference books and a few journals that are unavailable electronically. Earlier this year, Stanford University continued the trend when it removed all but 10,000 printed volumes from its Engineering Library.

UTSA designed its bookless library to engage students in an online format within a contemporary new space. The library features ultra modern furniture and space age décor as well as 10 desktop computers, a printer, a scanner and five large LCD screens. To support student study sessions and spontaneous collaboration, the library also offers a series of group study niches and three group study rooms outfitted with whiteboards. The spaces seek to reflect an emphasis on teamwork, communications and problem solving, skills integral to the success of professional engineers and scientists.

With the e-library now open, UTSA is exploring ways to take the bookless concept even further. In the next few months, it expects to start providing pre-loaded collections of e-books on e-reader devices like the iPad or Kindle for students to check out and take home.

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The British Library has announced that it will make its collections of bibliographic records available for free to researchers and other libraries, at www.bl.uk/bibliographic/datafree.html.

The UK national library has around 14 million catalogue records said to comprise a wealth of bibliographic data. The new initiative is expected to help expose this vast dataset to users worldwide, allowing researchers and other libraries to access and retrieve bibliographic records for publications dating back centuries and relating to every conceivable subject area.

The new free service will operate in parallel to the British Library's priced bulk MARC data supply activity which is used extensively by large commercial customers.

In some instances researchers may use the library's records for purposes very different from those for which they were originally created. The library recently provided the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) with some eight million bibliographic records - allowing the IPO to conduct research into publishing trends dating as far back as 1650, and to plot these patterns against the course of changes in IP legislation.

As the national library of the UK, the British Library seeks to provide world class information services to the academic, business, research and scientific communities and offer access to a large and comprehensive research collection. The library's collections include 150 million items from every era of written human history beginning with Chinese oracle bones dating from 300 BC, right up to the latest e-journals.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has announced that its premier subscription offering, Credo General Reference Premium (formerly Credo Unlimited), now includes 505 titles and will offer 525 by the end of 2010. Over the last three years, Credo General Reference has significantly expanded its acclaimed content. Ten new publishers have been added to Credo General Reference in the last year and customers will continue to see this list of publishers expand.

Led by Credo Reference's President, John Dove, the content acquisition process for Credo offerings draws on significant input from librarians themselves. Inputs that influence the selection of titles include suggestions from customers and prospective customers; recommendations from editorial experts hired to evaluate titles, publishers and subject areas; analysis of awards from US and UK library press and associations; and consideration of reviews from Choice, Booklist, RCL, ARBA and ALA's Guide to Reference.

For higher education Credo is emphasising 15 key subject areas which represent the core subjects in undergraduate education that have the highest need for subject encyclopaedias. Over the past two years, Credo General Reference has expanded its coverage of subjects by adding in-depth subject encyclopaedias in Biology, Business, Economics, Education, Engineering, English Composition/Communications/Journalism, Environmental Studies, History, International Relations/Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology/Anthropology, among others.

Credo Reference is also expanding content for community colleges in the US and further education colleges in the UK as well as public and school libraries worldwide.

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A new not-for-profit international consortium known as the Open Planets Foundation (OPF) has been formed to tackle the digital preservation challenge in Europe. Covering everything from medical records to family photos, current estimates suggest that there already exists over 100 GB of data for every individual person on the planet. With data creation set to double every 18 months, failure to adequately address the challenge of preserving this material is therefore seen to represent a major financial, intellectual and cultural risk. With the existing four-year European Commission Planets project achieving completion, OPF has been given the go-ahead to build on existing efforts and continue to tackle the constantly evolving long term digital preservation challenge.

Between 2006 and 2010 the Planets project is claimed to have delivered a number of practical digital preservations tools to assist organisations with assessing their preservation needs and provide the necessary technical solutions - www.planetsproject.eu. Hosted by the British Library, the OPF aims to expand on this work and develop the international digital preservation community further. It seeks to encourage the sharing of knowledge and best practice, and push forward on a variety of preservation R&D initiatives.

Founded by the Austrian Institute of Technology, the Austrian National Library, the British Library, the Royal and State and University Libraries of Denmark, the National Archives and Library of the Netherlands, Stanford University, Goportis and Microsoft, the OPF currently represents 12 libraries, archives, universities and commercial organisations. Aiming to eventually bring together hundreds of content holders and preservation solution providers, the OPF will not simply provide its member with access to the Planets tools but also offer guidance from leading experts on creating preservation policy, as well as technical support and training, in the interests of international digital preservation.

The OPF has been established to provide practical solutions and expertise in digital preservation, building on the €15 million investment made by the EU and Planets consortium. Its members include major research and national libraries, national archives, leading technology companies and research institutions. Members of OPF have privileged access to the technology, approaches, tools and services established by the Planets project which recognises and addresses threats to their valuable digital content.

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Stanford's Engineering Library has moved from the Terman Engineering Center to the new Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center. The shift is seen to mark the forefront of a movement toward the 'bookless library'. The new 'bookless' Engineering Library at Stanford University - that opened August 2, 2010 - will not actually be bookless, but will only feature about 10,000 of its 80,000 titles on the shelves. The rest will be available electronically.

The revamped library will have a completely electronic reference desk with four Kindle 2 wireless reading devices. It will be the first on campus to have a self-checkout and book security system. By this fall, it will also have 15 e-book readers that library patrons may take home like regular books. Librarians will not be staffing a desk to help students and faculty, but will be available through e-mail, online chatting and Facebook.

An online journal search tool called xSearch will scan 28 online databases, a grant directory and more than 12,000 scientific journals. The library includes a digital bulletin board at the entryway that will display RSS feeds updating visitors with the latest research.

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The British Library has compiled a new report from the research community that looks at the UK's existing intellectual property framework - reflecting the challenges researchers face on a daily basis. The report titled 'Driving UK Research - Is copyright a help or a hindrance?' calls for a consensus across all sectors on the need for reform to meet the demands of a modernising world.

Sourced directly from researchers, this report presents a 'grassroots view' of the current copyright framework in the UK. Looking at the barriers they encounter on a daily basis, the contributors' feedback not only highlights the obstructions to creativity but also put forward proposals for reforming UK intellectual property legislation to reflect the needs of today's researcher.

The report is available online at http://www.bl.uk/ip/pdf/drivingukresearch.pdf. It has been published under a Creative Commons licence, enabling others to copy, distribute, and make derivative non-commercial works.

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The British Library is initiating an interactive survey, UK SoundMap, launching as a regional trial in Sheffield. The survey will map the sounds of the acoustic landscape ('soundscape') and preserve the sounds of 2010 for the future. In collaboration with the Noise Futures Network and Audioboo, the British Library is embarking on a mass observation exercise to create a significant body of audio data for environment researchers.

The technology employed by the Audioboo recording application for smart phones gives the general public a chance to get involved with this innovative research project just by recording their surroundings and then describing them with simple tags and comments. The recordings and data will be retained permanently and made accessible to everyone for generations to come.

The recordings are generated as high quality audio files with GPS data embedded. These files will then be made available almost instantly on Audioboo FM as MP3 versions, which are also referenced on the Google map displayed on the British Library website.

With a pilot survey launching in July 2010, in the Sheffield area, extending to Barnsley, Doncaster, Chesterfield and the eastern margins of the Peak District National Park, the public are invited to record their surroundings and track what the UK really sounds like. Recordings will be studied by experts from the Noise Futures Network and stored in the British Library to create a permanent archive of everyday sounds for study. According to the experts, this type of database will be extremely valuable in understanding the type and distribution of various sounds in the environment. This survey launches with a view to expanding to a full national study later in the year.

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The British Library has been awarded the 'opening the world of knowledge' award for Timelines: Sources from History by the Nominet Internet Awards. The Nominet Internet Awards aim to recognise and celebrate individuals and organisations that are helping to make the Internet a secure, open, accessible and diverse experience for everyone who uses it.

Timelines: Sources from History (www.bl.uk/timeline) is a rich-media interactive that allows users to explore British Library collection items chronologically for the first time. Bringing together material from the Library's vast collections and using cutting-edge Flash technology, users are able to discover historical connections in an exciting multimedia experience. The timeline allows students to get a sense both of change and continuity when studying historical events.

The judges praised the British Library's interactive timeline for the way it brings global quality content to life for a worldwide audience and for its impressive use of multimedia and historical context setting. Timelines will be promoted in the UK and internationally as examples of best practice, including at the next international Internet Governance Forum (IGF) meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania on September 14, 2010.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has announced that it has signed an agreement to expand the SAGE Reference Collection on Credo, growing it from 68 titles to 125. All SAGE Reference titles published between 2000 and 2010 as well as all titles to be published in 2011 will now be available through the Credo Reference platform.

The SAGE Reference Collection on Credo is available as a whole or in subject collections such as SAGE Health Collection; SAGE Education Collection; SAGE Environment Collection; SAGE Research Methods Collection; SAGE Psychology Collection; SAGE Sociology Collection; SAGE Management Collection; SAGE Political Science Collection; and SAGE Criminology Collection. Institutions will be able to obtain these resources from Credo either by subscription or purchase. Users will experience the content as a fully integrated part of their Credo Reference experience.

The SAGE Reference titles that will now be available through Credo Reference include the 2010 Dartmouth Medal Honorable Mention winner, Encyclopedia of Journalism; and all of the new and forthcoming 2010 titles.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo's General Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Publisher Collections allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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The British Library has announced its forthcoming exhibition on the transformations we can expect to see in the world of research. The event 'Growing Knowledge - the Evolution of Research,' will run from October 12, 2010 to July 16, 2011. It will showcase some of the latest research tools, content and spaces in a fully interactive future-research environment. The exhibition will stimulate and inspire visitors as well as consult with them on the research services they want to experience from the library of the future.

The British Library's first Researcher in Residence, Dr Aleks Krotoski, will launch the exhibition. Dr Krotoski will engage in discussion and debate with the research community to explore some of the issues highlighted by the exhibition, as well as continue her own research. Designed to demonstrate the organic development of digital research and the growth of data using natural patterns, visitors will discover a new world of research that will seem a far cry from the traditional setting of Library Reading Rooms.

Through partnerships with HP and Haworth, users will experience an immersive digital environment in specially-designed multimedia research workstations. Using large touch-screens, each pod will offer access to interactive demonstrations, enabling researchers to experience digital research tools of the future. From these pods users will be able to explore digital maps and linked data, experience live crowd-sourcing, manipulate digital assets across multiple media and see how mobile technologies can be used to support research beyond the desktop.

To ensure broad access to the exhibition, Growing Knowledge will also be available online. Visitors who register when they visit the exhibition will be able to continue their interaction with the content online and contribute to the evaluation from home, cafe or external work space.

A major component of the Growing Knowledge exhibition will be evaluating the tools and services. Working with JISC and the Ciber Research Group, part of UCL, Library users and exhibition visitors will be invited to leave their feedback either at the exhibition or online to voice their views and indicate their interest in future discussions. The Library will also hold discussion groups for postgraduate students to explore some of the issues in more depth. This information will be fed into the overall evaluation of the 'Growing Knowledge' project, for which a final evaluation report will be delivered in July 2011, as well as two interim reports to be delivered in December 2010 and March 2011.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has announced a partnership with US-based digital content products and technologies provider ebrary to provide a user-friendly customisation option for the new Credo Topic Pages. Credo Reference users will now be able to research ebrary's extensive ebook content directly from the Credo Topic Pages.

Designed to provide contextualised, orderly access to authoritative content, each of the approximately 9,000 Credo Topic Pages is a starting point that assembles topical material from resources within and outside the library. Now, libraries that include the additional content will see their ebrary collection on Topic Pages, customised to their library.

ebrary offers academic libraries, corporations, public libraries and other organisations more than 170,000 full-text e-books from over 425 leading publishers under subscription, perpetual access and usage-based models. The company claims to be the first ebook vendor to be included in the Credo Topic Pages.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has signed an agreement to integrate four key reference books from Zed Books into the Credo General Reference collection. These are the first titles from Zed Books to be made available on Credo.

Zed Books has published more than 1,000 titles over the last three decades on topics as varied as trade, gender, aid, environment, government and development studies. The books emphasise progressive social goals including social justice, human rights, effective democratic institutions, international equity and environmental integrity.

Founded in 1999, Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Its General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology.

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The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, has announced that about 100,000 volumes from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library have been digitised. The Library is being made publically accessible as part of a partnership between Google, the University of California and the UC San Diego Libraries. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library claims to be the world's largest oceanography library.

In 2008, UC San Diego became the first Southern California University to partner with Google in its efforts to digitise the holdings of the world's prominent libraries. Since then, about 300,000 volumes and other materials have been digitised from UCSD's International Relations & Pacific Studies Library, the East Asian Language Collection and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library. The University of California was an early partner with Google, joining the Google Book Search Project in 2006 and agreeing to provide several million books from UC libraries for digitisation. To date, more than 2 million books from UC libraries have been digitised.

According to Peter Brueggeman, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library, the materials digitised by Google include a wealth of books and journals, as well as numerous scientific expedition reports. The Scripps Library's collections cover subjects ranging from oceanography, marine biology, marine geology, marine technology, climate science and geophysics, with extensive resources in ecology, zoology, fisheries and seismology. The digitised materials also include numerous research expedition reports documenting scientific observations and discoveries dating back to the 1800s.

The Google project is helping UC San Diego and other university libraries to create digital access to thousands of texts and scholarly materials. Consequently, this helps to protect and preserve library collections for future generations and from catastrophic loss such as an earthquake or fire. As part of the agreement with Google, the University of California is receiving digital copies of all books and other materials scanned from the UC libraries. The university's copies are stored in HathiTrust, a shared digital repository developed in partnership with other major research institutions across the country.

The digitised books from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library and other materials from the UCSD Libraries are accessible via the Google Book Search Index. The search engine allows anyone to search the full text of books from libraries and publishing partners. For books in the public domain, readers will be able to view, browse and read the full texts online. For books protected by copyright, users can access basic background (such as the book's title and the author's name), a few lines of text related to their search and information about where they can borrow or buy a book.

Since the Google Book Search Project's inception in 2004, Google has digitised more than 12 million books from libraries and publishing partners throughout the world. In addition to the University of California, other libraries at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University and Oxford University are among those that have also partnered with Google. Google's ultimate goal with the project is to make all of the knowledge contained within the world's books searchable and discoverable online.

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The British Library has announced a new partnership with online publisher brightsolid. The partnership between the British Library and brightsolid will enable the digitisation of a minimum of 4 million pages of newspapers over the first two years. Over the course of ten years, the agreement aims to deliver up to 40 million pages as the mass digitisation process becomes progressively more efficient and as in-copyright content is scanned following negotiation with rightsholders.

Spanning three centuries and including 52,000 local, regional, national and international titles, the British Library claims to hold one of the world's finest collections of newspapers. Each year the Newspaper Library at Colindale is used by 30,000 researchers in subjects ranging from family history and genealogy to sports statistics, politics and industrial history. This vast resource is held mainly in hard copy and microfilm, necessitating a trip to the north London site for people wishing to use the collection.

Digitised material will include extensive coverage of local, regional and national press across three and a half centuries. It will focus on specific geographic areas, along with periods such as the census years between 1841 and 1911. Additional categories will be developed looking at key events and themes. The aim will be to build a 'critical mass' of material for researchers - particularly in the fields of family history and genealogy.

brightsolid, a subsidiary of Dundee-based publisher DC Thomson, was selected following an EU procurement process. brightsolid is taking on the commercial and technical risks of the project, with no direct costs to the British Library. The firm will digitise content from the British Library Newspaper Library, which it will then make available online via a paid-for website as well as integrating it into its family history websites. This resource will be available for free to users on-site at the British Library and copies of all scanned materials will be deposited with the Library to be held in the national collection in perpetuity.

Along with out-of-copyright material from the newspaper archive - defined in this context as pre-1900 newspaper material - the partnership will also seek to digitise a range of in-copyright material, with the agreement of the relevant rightsholders. This copyright material will, with the express permission of the publishers, be made available via the online resource.

The appointment of brightsolid as its newspaper digitisation partner is projected to help the British Library fulfill its strategic goals of long-term preservation of and access to the national newspaper collection. The Library's newspaper strategy aims to secure the future of this unique resource by moving the hard-copy collections from the current building at Colindale to a purpose-built storage facility in Boston Spa, West Yorkshire. Access to the collection will be provided via microfilm and digital copies made available at the Library's main site at St Pancras.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has signed an agreement with the Welsh Academy to integrate the Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales into the Credo collection. Published by the University of Wales Press, this is the first University of Wales Press title to be made available on Credo.

More than a decade in the making and named a 2008 Best Reference by Library Journal, the one-volume Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales covers more than 3,300 subjects and explores all the people, places and events making Wales so culturally, historically and geographically rich. With the new agreement, the Encyclopaedia’s vast content will become accessible and completely cross-searchable by researchers worldwide, within Credo’s collection of more than 480 titles.

Founded in 1999, Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Its General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology.

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The German National Library of Science & Technology (TIB) has announced that it has assumed responsibility for the digital preservation and availability of textual and non-textual materials. TIB, together with partner libraries ZB MED and ZBW within the Leibniz Library Network for Research Information (Goportis), is developing concepts for securing resources, allowing for existing experience and theoretical approaches. It is expected that an important prerequisite will be fulfilled with the decision to use a professional archiving system, which the TIB will set up and oversee.

It is observed that producers and users of scientific materials typically place demands in respect of integrity, authenticity, reliability and citability. The TIB seeks to take on this challenge with trustworthy and reliable digital preservation and a high quality assurance. The safeguarding of publication rights, long-term availability, the enrichment with bibliographical and technical metadata as well as the professional search for, and digital presentation of, the data are seen to be important aspects of this.

The TIB is the German National Library for all areas of engineering as well as architecture, chemistry, information technology, mathematics and physics.

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Online reference library Credo Reference has announced an agreement to integrate five Princeton University Press titles into the Credo General Reference collection. Princeton University Press publishes approximately 250 academic books each year across various disciplines.

Following the latest agreement, Credo users can gain access to the reference works, The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, The Princeton Encyclopedia of the World Economy, The Handbook of Economic Sociology and The Princeton Guide to Ecology.

Credo has also signed an agreement to integrate two key Purdue University Press works into the Credo General Reference collection. These are the first titles from Purdue University Press to be made available on Credo.

Purdue University Press publishes 35-40 books, videos and web-based products annually, focusing on business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, the humanities and sciences. Its knowledge compendiums are claimed to provide answers for academics, students, professionals and institutions.

Founded in 1999, Credo Reference, with offices in Oxford and Boston, has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Its General Reference services combine content from multiple publishers with cross-referencing technology.

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Online reference services provider Credo Reference, US, has signed an agreement to integrate five Princeton University Press titles into the Credo General Reference collection.

One of the leading American university presses, Princeton University Press publishes about 250 innovative books written by the greatest minds in academia each year, in a wide variety of disciplines. With this new agreement, Credo users will now gain full access to reference works such as The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (CHOICE Outstanding Academic Titles, 2009), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book, 1993), The Princeton Encyclopedia of the World Economy, The Handbook of Economic Sociology and The Princeton Guide to Ecology.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo’s General Reference services seek to combine content from multiple publishers with a cross-referencing technology. Publisher Collections are expected to allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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Online reference services provider Credo Reference, US, has announced the launch of Credo Topic Pages, a new search tool for libraries. Designed to provide contextualised, orderly access to authoritative content, each of the over 10,000 Credo Topic Pages is projected as an all-in-one starting point that assembles topical material from many resources from within and outside the library. Librarians can choose which resources will be displayed on their customised version of Credo Topic Pages, helping their users gain subject orientation, context and vocabulary and pathways to further exploration.

Credo Topic Pages seek to create value for libraries. Presenting and utilising the library’s resources at the point of need, these are claimed to function as an ‘anytime’ reference interview. Designed to drive additional traffic to the library from the open web, the Topic Pages are expected to increase the usage of libraries’ online resource investments, and bring together unconnected databases into one easy-to-use research gateway. According to the company, libraries who participated in the beta testing of the product are giving it rave reviews.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo’s General Reference services seek to combine content from multiple publishers with a cross-referencing technology. Publisher Collections are expected to allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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London Libraries Consortium has announced that 10 of its 12 members are already offering e-books to library customers. Their move comes ahead of the recommendation for free access to e-books outlined in the Modernisation Review of Public Libraries: a Policy Statement published on March 22, 2010. The consortium represents 12 London Public Library Services, a third of London’s boroughs.

Library resources are shared across London. Library members can borrow from and return stock to any library within the consortium, giving them access to over 100 libraries in the city and effectively creating one card across a third of the Capital. The consortium believes measures such as these, which are of genuine help to the public, will work on reversing the decline in use of public libraries.

Established in 2004, the consortium uses joint working to improve innovation and back office efficiencies and to negotiate reduced supplier rates through joint procurement. The Review recommends consideration of a new strategic body for libraries.

The consortium’s local offer includes keeping some monies in reserve for ‘local flavour’ titles. This helps to ensure that the libraries do not just replicate bookshops but also stock popular out-of-print items – the service that no bookshop can offer - and maintain their educational and social role.

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Online reference library Credo Reference, US, has announced a partnership with EasyBib.com to simplify the student’s research process. EasyBib.com is an automatic bibliography maker, providing quick and accurate formatting to compile a works cited list.

The new agreement between EasyBib and Credo seeks to help students research their topic using Credo Reference and its innovative gateways to other library resources. Also, they can keep track of their bibliographic data during the research process, instead of waiting until the end to compile their bibliography.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo’s General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Publisher Collections allow libraries to augment their collection with specific, deep reference content from highly-regarded publishers.

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The British Library and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) have announced a framework agreement to enable both parties to work together to identify research priorities in India and the UK and work jointly on projects that support research in this field. The agreement seeks to build stronger bonds between Indian and UK-based research and Higher Education institutions.

Managed by a joint steering committee, both parties will meet on a regular basis to review progress of the agreement and agree on specific future research projects. Both organisations are visiting India next week to meet representatives from the government, National Archives, research funding agencies and leading academic institutions.

The AHRC has identified India as a country of priority for engagement in order to increase research opportunities in this field, contribute to greater understanding of India and British culture and history, and facilitate the study of Indian history in education institutions. The agreement with the British Library is designed to support these aims.

The British Library aims to transform research in this field by improving access to its South Asian collections and therefore facilitating new subject areas for scholarship. Part of the Library's vision is to digitise a critical mass of original source material that comprises the India Office Records (itself over 14 km of shelving).

Cologne-based libraries and the Library Centre of Rhineland-Palatinate (LBZ), in cooperation with the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center (hbz), have reportedly become the first German libraries to adopt open access for bibliographic data. The institutions have published their catalogue data for free public use. The University and Public Library of Cologne (USB), the Library of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, the University Library of the University of Applied Science of Cologne and the LBZ are participating in the move. The release of bibliographic data is projected to form a basis for linking that data with data from other domains in the Semantic Web.

The objective of the latest initiative is to provide free access to knowledge to everybody via the Internet. Until now, it was not possible to download library catalogues as a whole. The library of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has already published its data under a public domain licence in January. According to observers, cooperation and data exchange between libraries have been firmly established in the library world for more than 100 years. Freely supplying bibliographic data should not only further enhance cooperation among libraries but enable subsequent use by non-library institutions, they feel.

The North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center has begun evaluating the possibilities to transform data from library catalogues in such a way that it can become a part of the emerging Semantic Web. The liberalisation of bibliographic data is seen to provide the legal background to perform this transformation in a cooperative, open and transparent way. Currently there are discussions with other member libraries of the hbz library network to publish their data.

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2CUL, a partnership between the libraries at Cornell University and Columbia University, has announced a study to discover if the library can help ameliorate high attrition and low completion rates for doctoral students in the humanities.

The goal of the project is to listen to graduate students’ concerns and determine whether the library can develop strategies that will help directly with their research and contribute to their success. Grants from the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation will support the user needs assessment to determine what academic libraries can do to help humanities doctoral students complete their degrees.

Cornell’s Graduate School and Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are providing additional support. Support from Cornell's Graduate School comes from a grant from the Council of Graduate Schools for its CGS Ph.D. Completion Project.

The pilot project will involve focus groups with Cornell and Columbia’s humanities students in all stages of their PhD work, as well as recent graduates. Interviewers will then develop a questionnaire based on information from the focus groups and administer it to 20-25 students in 3-4 departments at each institution.

After the analysis period, the institutions will recommend a course of action to address the findings. Possible steps forward would include partnerships with the graduate schools, writing centres and other campus entities at both institutions. Assessment will be completed by March 2011.

Humanities students have longer mean times to complete their PhDs than students in any other discipline and, according to a recent National Science Foundation study, those times are increasing. In 2003, the average humanities student took nine years to graduate, up from 7.5 years in 1978. Another study shows that humanities students’ 49-percent completion rate within a 10-year period is considerably lower than the rates of their peers in mathematics and physical sciences (55 percent), social sciences (56 percent), life sciences (63 percent) and engineering (64 percent).

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The British Library has published a new report titled 'Supporting Economic Growth 2007 - 2009', the full version of which is available online at www.bl.uk/bipc/evaluation. The report describes British Library Business & IP Centre's professed success in providing London’s aspiring entrepreneurs with both the inspiration and confidence to take on the economic downturn.

The British Library Business & IP Centre, launched in 2006 and supported by the London Development Agency (LDA), seeks to support the city’s small business community. According to the latest report, the Centre currently helps London's visiting SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) generate £22 in additional turnover for every £1 invested by the LDA. This is seen to highlight the Centre's importance and the significant return on investment it delivers.

Over the past year, the Centre has reportedly become a hub for aspiring entrepreneurs looking to bounce back from recession, with footfall almost doubling over the last 12 months. Job losses across the capital have contributed significantly to this rise in footfall, with 27 percent of users stating that they were either unemployed or had recently been made redundant. In total, 65 of the 471 users surveyed self-reported having started a business between 2007 and 2009. This is claimed to indicate that the Centre has helped its 6,007 users during this time create 829 new businesses in London – about three times as many as in Westfield, Europe's largest shopping centre.

Despite being conducted at the end of 2009 in the height of a global recession, the survey of 471 users, carried out by Adroit Economics Ltd., is seen to demonstrate the value of the Business & IP Centre. In total, 89 percent of entrepreneurs who used its business resources between 2007 and 2009 reportedly felt they would not have achieved such success without the Centre's support.

The Centre has over £5 million in resources, including market research, company reports and databases, and an archive of over 60 million patents freely available.

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The British Library and Microsoft Research have announced that the new open source 'Research Information Centre' (RIC) Framework v1.0 is now available to download for free at http://ric.codeplex.com. The RIC is seen to represent an entirely new way of conducting research by providing an online environment in which to navigate the collection of digital information available to 21st century researchers. It aims to maximise web technology to improve both flexibility and knowledge sharing for researchers, wherever they are in the world.

The British Library and Microsoft Research have worked in partnership to design and develop a 'virtual research environment' that will provide a single easy-to-use interface enabling research teams to work collaboratively. The RIC is projected to provide an environment in which users can create, share, discuss, manage, find and track articles, references, bookmarks, funding proposals, presentations and all the other digital information related to their research.

Built using the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Platform, the binaries and source code are being made publicly available. This is aimed to encourage experimentation and use amongst the scientific community to develop the RIC's foundation templates into an application that will offer support at every stage of the research life-cycle. The British Library is developing a RIC template that will incorporate a range of intuitive and customisable tools of relevance to biomedical research.

The British Library is working with a number of partners to understand biomedical research user needs and evolve the functionality of the RIC to meet those needs. The aim is to develop and support an RIC community that focuses on development and sharing of web parts that can be 'plugged in' to the RIC to enable research teams to define their own online environment.

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The British Library, Tate, V&A, National Portrait Gallery, BFI, Wellcome Trust, Imperial War Museum and JISC, in a letter published in Times, have sought to ensure the safe passage of Clause 42 of the UK government's Digital Economy Bill. If passed, the bill is expected to provide the UK with the best orphan works solution in the world, unlocking vast amounts of collections for the nation. Orphan works are works with no known owner.

It has been observed that proposed amendments to the Orphan Works Clause 42 of the Digital Economy Bill will pose a major barrier to mass digitisation of content by the UK's leading national institutions. Nearly 40 percent of some of these institutions' collections are orphan works. Restricting the digitisation of these works is seen to limit access and leave a huge volume of historically important collections ‘in limbo'. A significant proportion of these were never originally intended for commercial use and should not be treated in the same way as commercially produced in-copyright orphan works, it is argued.

In the view of these signatories, copyright collecting societies do have a major role to play in managing the copyright of known and commercially published rights holders. However, they are not the only institutions capable of acting responsibly in relation to orphan works. The educational and cultural sectors also have a long history of respecting rights holders in the provision of access, combined with an unrivalled knowledge of the unique material that sits within their collections, it is noted. The suggestion of an orphan works licence for such institutions, put forward under the Digital Economy Bill, is seen to offer a flexible system.

The Digital Economy Bill proposes a system that allows a cultural or educational organisation to apply for a licence for the use of these works. Such a flexible system is the right one given the types of works that fall into the category of orphan works, it has been stated.

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Safari Books Online, a US-based e-reference joint venture between publishers O'Reilly Media, Inc. and Pearson Technology Group, has announced that will add more than 350 new titles in 2010 from Packt, a fast-growing publisher of digital books. Developers and IT professionals will benefit from additional Open Source Packt titles available in Safari Books Online's digital subscription-based library.

Packt specialises in Open Source topics for developers and IT professionals, most notably jQuery, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! All new Packt Open Source publications will be available in an online subscription library exclusively through Safari Books Online.

Safari Books Online is an on-demand digital library that delivers expert content in both book and video form from the world's leading authors in technology and business. It offers a range of product mixes and pricing programmes for organisations, government agencies and individuals.

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The National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health, has been named a partner in a multi-centered grant to digitise materials in the history of medicine. As one of five libraries participating in the digital Medical Heritage Project, NLM will receive $360,000 over the next two months to digitise items from its historical medical collections.

The initiative is funded by a $1.5 million award to the Open Knowledge Commons from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. About 30,000 volumes of public domain works will be digitised from the collections of some of the world's leading medical libraries. These include NLM, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and the New York Public Library.

NLM will contribute digital versions of thousands of medical materials, including publications dating back to the 17th century. The NLM History of Medicine Division collection includes 90 early western manuscripts (before 1600), 139 Arabic and Persian medical manuscripts, an East Asian collection of more than 2,000 printed books, manuscripts and visual materials, over 83,000 prints and photographs, all printed books in the NLM collection printed before 1914, thousands of later pamphlets and dissertations, and all pre-1871 journals.

This project will eventually make resources permanent and freely available through a digital library. Plans are to include more library partners and provide Web access to the collection.

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CERN Library has announced that it now offers the bibliographic book records, held in its library catalogue, to be freely downloaded by any third party. The records are provided under the Public Domain Data Licence, which permits colleagues around the world to reuse and upgrade the data for any purpose.

It has been observed that though librarians are in general very favourable to the principles of open access, surprisingly few libraries have so far set free the data they produce themselves. The data of CERN Library will be used by the Open Library Project to provide a webpage for every book and allow users to add content like table of contents, classifications and summaries. For massive reuse of data, the data will be provided soon by an open Z39.50, SRU and OAI interface via biblios.net, a repository of open bibliographic data.

CERN Library is part of the Scientific Information Service of CERN - the European Organisation for Nuclear Research. It acquires and manages information resources in all fields of relevance to the Organisation, and seeks to make these accessible in the most convenient way to the worldwide particle physics community.

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Cornell University Library, one of the leading academic research libraries in the US, is broadening the funding base for its online scientific repository, arXiv. Nearly 600,000 e-prints - research articles published online in physics, mathematics, statistics, computer science and related disciplines - now reside in arXiv, which claims to be an open information source for hundreds of thousands of scientific researchers.

arXiv will remain free for readers and submitters, but the Library has established a voluntary, collaborative business model to engage institutions that benefit most from arXiv. The 200 institutions that use arXiv most heavily account for more than 75 percent of institutional downloads. Cornell is now asking these institutions for financial support in the form of annual contributions. Most of the top 25 institutions have already committed to helping arXiv. Institutions that have already pledged support include California Institute of Technology; University of California, Berkeley, University of Cambridge (UK), CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research (Switzerland), CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Max Planck Society (Germany), among others.

The proposed funding model is viewed as a short-term strategy, and the Library is actively seeking input on a long-term solution. Currently, Cornell University Library supports the operating costs of arXiv, which are comparable to the costs of the university's collection budget for physics and astronomy. As one of the most influential innovations in scholarly communications since the advent of the Internet, arXiv's original dissemination model represented the first significant means to provide expedited access to scientific research well ahead of formal publication.

Researchers upload their own articles to arXiv, and they are usually made available to the public the next day. arXiv, founded by physics professor Paul Ginsparg, has about 400,000 users and serves more than 2.5 million article downloads per month.

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The British Library and Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) have commissioned a study into postgraduate education. Emerging findings focus on current numbers of students, profiles and trends, regional disparities and costs and benefits. Updating an earlier study produced in 2004, it is expected to provide vital information in support of the Government's current review of postgraduate education. The report can be found online at www.bl.uk/news/pgreport and www.hepi.ac.uk

The findings of the 'Postgraduate Education in the United Kingdom' study are projected to provide an overview of the current trends, issues and challenges facing the postgraduate sector. The growth of the international postgraduate community and increase in women undertaking postgraduate study are seen to demonstrate the leading role the UK is playing in the sector. This is helping to create an international market place for research students who collaborate to contribute hugely to the UK's research output, knowledge economy, innovation and economic advancement, it has been observed. However, the report also raises issues and challenges that the academic community faces - such as rising fees, number of UK domiciled postgraduates and salary premiums.

Over 270,000 students enrolled for postgraduate courses in 2007-08, with the sector seeing growth of 27 percent in masters' degrees and 9 percent in doctoral degrees. These domestic growth rates, however, are much lower than those of students from overseas, and now 50 percent of masters' students and 44% of doctoral students are international students. While this recognises the strength of the UK's research base, it also demonstrates the need to encourage more UK based students to undertake postgraduate study in the nation, says the study.

With more women than men, amongst UK-domiciled students, undertaking postgraduate study, these figures highlight the increasing accessibility of UK academia. Further, with science subjects such as engineering and technology, biosciences and physical sciences dominating the postgraduate arena, this reflects the support provided by Research Councils and other institutions.

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Online reference library Credo Reference, US, has signed an agreement with Hodder Education to incorporate three major subject references into the Credo collection. These will be the first Hodder Education titles licensed to Credo.

Hodder Education publishes for the educational market at all levels. It claims to be the second largest publisher for secondary and further education in the UK and is also a major publisher of higher education and health sciences textbooks and reference works. The three titles that will be added to Credo Reference’s collection of over 440 titles are: Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Psychology, The Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics and The Essentials of Global Politics.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 2002. Credo’s General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide.

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Online reference library Credo Reference, US, has signed an agreement to launch a new Publisher Collection from CABI. A set of CABI’s reference resources will soon be added to the Credo Reference platform.

CABI is a non-profit international organisation that provides information to solve problems in agriculture and the environment. The CABI Agricultural Collection on Credo will include all of CABI’s key subject encyclopaedias and dictionaries devoted to the applied life sciences. They will be available by subscription or purchase on the Credo Reference platform. Planned titles for the collection include: The Encyclopedia of Farm Animal Nutrition; The Encyclopedia of Fruit & Nuts; The Encyclopedia of Seeds: Science, Technology and Uses; A Dictionary of Entomology; Dictionary of the Fungi, 10th Edition; Fungal Families of the World; and The Encyclopedia of Applied Animal Behavior and Welfare.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 1999. Credo’s General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide.

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STM and scholarly publisher Wiley-Blackwell, US, has announced that The Cochrane Collaboration will be renewing its license with India. Representatives of Wiley-Blackwell and the Indian Council of Medical Research will meet on January 27, 2010, to formalise the modalities of this arrangement.

This national license will enable about 60 million internet users gain access to The Cochrane Library’s internationally renowned collection of healthcare databases. This includes gold-standard Cochrane Systematic Reviews, which help clinicians and consumers make decisions about what treatments are best for their patients.

The Cochrane Library contains healthcare information, including Systematic Reviews from The Cochrane Collaboration. These Reviews bring together research on the effects of healthcare and are considered the gold standard for determining the relative effectiveness of different interventions.

The Cochrane Collaboration is a UK registered international charity and claims to be the world's leading producer of systematic Reviews. It has been demonstrated that Cochrane Systematic Reviews are of comparable or better quality and are updated more often than the Reviews published in print journals.

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British Library, the national library of the UK, will reportedly gain legal powers to archive millions of websites after media reports exposed long delays in introducing the measures. The move by UK ministers to fast-track the provision of new legal powers to British Library follows warnings from the Library and National Museum of Scotland that historical record is being lost. The new initiative will introduce powers to allow six major libraries to copy every free website based in the UK as part of their efforts to record Britain's scientific, political and cultural history.

In October 2009, the Guardian reported that senior executives at the British Library and National Library of Scotland (NLS) were disappointed at the government's failure to execute the powers in the six years since they were established by an act of parliament in 2003.

The libraries had then warned that they had already lost millions of pages recording certain events, such as the MPs' expenses scandal, the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the Iraq war. They would lose millions more, as they were not legally authorised to archive these sites, it was feared. The powers are similar to copyright laws which requires publishers in the UK to provide the libraries - chiefly the British Library and the NLS, but also the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian in Oxford, Cambridge University library and Trinity College Dublin - with copies of every printed book, magazine, journal and newspaper.

In an attempt to head off criticism, Culture Minister Margaret Hodge has now launched a consultation, due to end in March. The initiative would allow the libraries to copy and archive free sites using the .uk domain name and all other UK-based sites. There are more than 4 million free websites active in the UK and proposed new domain names such as .sco for Scotland and .cym for Wales will also be included.

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B2B publisher PennWell Corporation, US, has announced a partnership with US-based digital content products and technologies provider ebrary. Under the deal, information from PennWell’s oil and gas e-books will be made available online for the first time. Corporations in petroleum, power and related industries can now expect to make it easier for employees to find, use and manage the information they need online.

All PennWell titles will be delivered via ebrary’s interface and include technology that seeks to make it easy to pinpoint and manage relevant information from multiple sources within the organisation and on the web. With InfoTools, scientists and engineers can select words of interest in a PennWell e-book, and automatically link to additional statistics, regulations, process charts, and other information within the collection and other online resources. Additionally, personal bookshelves make storing, managing, and sharing highlights, notes, and hyperlinks quick and efficient.

Corporations may subscribe to the entire PennWell collection with unlimited organisation-wide access and new titles added at no additional cost, or purchase different packages to meet their needs. The selection may be previewed at http://tinyurl.com/pennwell.

Sixty-nine titles in Petroleum address the technology and business of the petroleum industry, from upstream to downstream. Topics include basic petroleum, business, exploration, logging, drilling, reservoir engineering, production, offshore, machinery, pipeline and refining. Forty-four titles in electric power provide both detailed overviews of how electricity is generated, transmitted and distributed, as well as specific technology and industry trends. Topics include electric power basics, business issues, deregulation, generation, transmission and distribution, and natural gas. Fifty-six titles in fire service feature materials that the modern fire service needs to train and operate properly, from basic firefighting to managing the departmental budget. Topics include strategy and tactics, safety and risk management, management, technical rescue, career/advancement, apparatus/hydraulics, EMS, hazardous materials, training, public education/information and investigations.

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Online reference library Credo Reference, US, has signed an agreement with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to integrate the OECD Factbook 2010 into the Credo collection. This is the first OECD title to be made available on Credo.

The OECD Factbook 2010 is a key reference tool in economic and policy issues. It contains extensive information, as well as graphs and tables for more than 100 indicators covering a wide range of areas. Topics include economy, agriculture, education, energy, environment, foreign aid, health and quality of life, industry, communications, population, trade, and taxation. With this new agreement, the Factbook’s content will now be accessible and completely cross-searchable by researchers worldwide, within Credo’s collection of more than 440 titles.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 1999. Credo’s General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide.

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The British Library and the BBC have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in a bid to make the content and assets of both organisations more widely available.

Managed by a joint steering committee, the MoU seeks to develop new ways of integrating access to nearly a million hours of BBC TV and radio content and over 150 million British Library items. This is projected to significantly increase access to research material across both national institutions for the benefit of researchers and the wider public.

Signed by BBC Director General Mark Thompson and British Library CEO Dame Lynne Brindley, the MoU also proposes that the BBC and British Library collaborate to develop viable approaches on various important issues. These include rights management, distribution of archive content, digitisation and storage.

The agreement follows MoUs signed earlier this year between the BBC and the British Film Institute, and the BBC and the National Archives.

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Online reference library Credo Reference, US, has signed an agreement to launch an IGI Global Publisher Collection. Many of the most popular and highly acclaimed IGI Global information technology and computer science titles will soon be available through the Credo Reference platform.

This latest Publisher Collection from Credo will provide libraries with the option of purchasing access to the IGI Global resources in one of two ways: as an annual subscription or for purchase. Users will experience IGI Global’s content as a fully integrated part of the esteemed Credo Reference experience, or as a standalone database for those libraries that don’t also subscribe to other Credo Reference products. Planned titles for the collection include such resources as the Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, second edition; Handbook of Research on E-Learning Methodologies for Language Acquisition; Cyber-Security and Global Information Assurance: Threat Analysis and Response Solutions; Handbook of Research on Digital Libraries: Design, Development and Impact; and Encyclopedia of Mobile Computing and Commerce.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 1999. Credo’s General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide.

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The HathiTrust Digital Library, a partnership among some of the US's largest academic research libraries, has announced a service that is expected to transform how researchers use the more than 1.6 billion pages (4.6 million volumes) in its collections.

The service allows for full-text searching capabilities across the entire library. Researchers can now search public domain and in-copyright works by keyword or phrase. Based on open source Solr/Lucene technology, the service expands on an experimental search of public domain volumes, introduced in November 2008. Full-text search will continue to be supported across the repository as it grows at a rate of hundreds of thousands of volumes every month.

In combination with the HathiTrust Digital Library's carefully curated bibliographic data, the new functionality allows researchers to more efficiently locate items relevant to their research. It also lays the foundation for future services such as full-text search with faceted browsing, advanced search, ‘more like this’ options, and tools that can be used in computational research.

HathiTrust (http://www.hathitrust.org) is a collaboration of the thirteen universities of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the University of California system, and the University of Virginia. It currently includes digitised volumes from the University of Michigan, University of California, Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin. The HathiTrust partners seek to develop the repository and its services to meet the long-term needs of their academic communities, and offer a unique resource on the Web for scholarship and research.

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Online reference library Credo Reference, US, has signed an agreement to launch a SAGE Reference Publisher Collection. Nearly 70 SAGE Reference titles will now be available through the Credo Reference platform.

This Publisher Collection from Credo will offer SAGE resources either as a complete collection or as individual titles. Librarians will now be able to obtain these resources from Credo by subscription or purchase. Users will however experience the content as a fully integrated part of their Credo Reference experience. A sampling of the SAGE reference titles that will be integrated include resources such as Encyclopedia of Anthropology; Encyclopedia of Counseling; Encyclopedia of Business Ethics & Society; Encyclopedia of Disability; Encyclopedia of Global Warming and Climate Change; Encyclopedia of Political Communication; Encyclopedia of Cancer and Society; and the SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 1999. Credo's General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide. Earlier, in July 2009, signed an agreement with SAGE to provide titles from SAGE' Key Concepts and Key Thinkers Series on the Credo Reference platform. SAGE's titles are well-complemented in Credo, enhancing the cross-referencing across Credo's more than 400 titles and millions of entries.

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The British Library has announced that a report – based on a study conducted along with the Research Information Network – seeks to provide an insight into how information is used by researchers across life sciences. The report has revealed that researcher practices diverge from policies promoted by funders and information service providers.

The study, ‘Patterns of Information Use and Exchange: Case Studies of Researchers in Life Sciences’, used an approach to capture the day-to-day patterns of information use in seven research teams from a wide range of disciplines. It was undertaken over 11 months and involved 56 participants. The report concludes that ‘one-size-fits-all’ information and data sharing policies are not achieving scientifically productive and cost-efficient information use in life sciences. It found a significant gap between how researchers behave and the policies and strategies of funders and service providers. This suggests that the attempts to implement such strategies have had only a limited impact.

According to the report, researchers tend to use informal and trusted sources of advice from colleagues, rather than institutional service teams, to help identify information sources and resources. It also says that the use of social networking tools for scientific research purposes is far more limited than expected; data and information sharing activities are mainly driven by needs and benefits perceived as most important by life scientists rather than ‘top-down’ policies and strategies; and there are marked differences in the patterns of information use and exchange between research groups active in different areas of the life sciences, reinforcing the need to avoid standardised policy approaches. The report sets out a number of recommendations to funders, universities and information service providers on how policy and services can be more aligned with research practice.

The study was undertaken by the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation, the UK Digital Curation Centre and the University of Edinburgh’s Information Services. The report can be downloaded from www.rin.ac.uk/case-studies

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US-based Cornell University Library has announced the release of a book titled Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for US Libraries, Archives, and Museums. The book is projected to help professionals at cultural heritage institutions address issues of using the Internet legally to improve public access to their vast collections.

Based on an Australian manual written by Emily Hudson and Andrew T. Kenyon of the University of Melbourne, the book has been developed by Cornell University Library’s senior policy advisor Peter B. Hirtle, along with Hudson and Kenyon. It has been tailored to conform to American law and practice.

The development of new digital technologies has led to fundamental changes in the ways cultural institutions fulfil their public missions of access, preservation, research and education. Many institutions are developing publicly accessible websites that allow users to visit online exhibitions, search collection databases, access images of collection items, and in some cases create their own digital content. Digitisation, however, also raises the possibility of copyright infringement. It is imperative that staff in libraries, archives and museums understand fundamental copyright principles and how institutional procedures can be affected by the law.

Copyright and Cultural Institutions seeks to assist understanding and compliance with copyright law. It addresses the basics of copyright law and the exclusive rights of the copyright owner, the major exemptions used by cultural heritage institutions, and stresses the importance of “risk assessment� when conducting any digitisation project. Case studies on digitising oral histories and student work are also included.

The book can be purchased at https://www.createspace.com/3405063, and freely download at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1495365 and http://hdl.handle.net/1813/14142.

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The British Library, the national library of the UK, has announced that it expects researchers to benefit from proposals announced recently by Lord Mandelson and IP Minister, David Lammy. The Library has welcomed initiatives to make copyright fit for the digital age. It has long argued that educators and researchers will profit from the resolution of issues on copyright and improved access to research material; and that these changes will boost the UK knowledge economy.

The latest proposal is viewed as recognition that the issue of orphan works is critical to the copyright roadmap. Allowing orphan works to be used without fear of liability will free up one of the obstacles that the creative industries face on a day-to-day basis, the British Library maintains.

The Library has also stated that it welcomes and looks forward to the results on the SABIP study on the relationship between copyright and contract law, to be published at the end of 2009. It says research is built upon clarity of access to, and reuse of, copyright material. This is not guaranteed when access and reuse provisions vary from contract to contract.

Exploring the difference between commercial and non-commercial intent and use has also been welcomed by the British Library. This is seen to facilitate mass digitisation of historical material that has no commercial value, but of high academic importance that sits in libraries, museums and archives.

The British Library has expressed belief that successful public policy formation in copyright should incorporate the principles of public interest; preservation of cultural heritage; inclusion of orphan works, fair dealing; and technology neutral.

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Safari Books Online, a US-based e-reference joint venture between publishers O'Reilly Media, Inc. and Pearson Technology Group, has announced the launch of Safari Books Online 6.0. This release features advancements in the product offering, including new functionality such as an interactive reading experience; dynamic content categorisation; innovative community and collaboration features; and enhanced search functionality.

Safari Books Online 6.0 features improved search functionality that makes it easy to find all content in the digital library, including text, video and curriculum guides. A new interface also enables users to read the content while keeping the list of search results in view. Enhanced advanced search query capability enables the building of search rules through a simple dialogue box.

In addition, shared folders, search results, and notes allow workgroup users to network with other users about topics of interest, recommend content, and discover additional titles favoured by experts in the field. The ‘review this book’ feature allows subscribers to comment on a book or write a complete review. All ‘review this book’ entries are public and can be seen by all site visitors, with or without a subscription.

The latest version offers both an Amazon rating and Safari Books Online user-generated ratings on books and videos in the digital library to ensure users are finding the best materials available from trustworthy sources. Also, users can now create personal folders and save search preferences to categorise material in the digital library, enabling them to find and store titles of interest more quickly. Users can create and attach notes to a book or a page, highlight text and attach notes to that text, and print notes and highlights in a custom summary.

The enhanced readability feature gives users the ability to make inline notes in the text they are reading, dog ear or bookmark specific pages, and share these notes with other team members. Safari Books Online’s mobile-friendly website ensures that subscribers can read books wherever they are. PDFs downloaded from Safari Books Online are now optimised for mobile devices, computers and other reading devices.

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Online library provider Questia Media, Inc., US, has announced that it has added an additional 1,900 copyrighted books to Questia, its digital collection. The collection is available online and through its recently launched application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The application is claimed to have become one of the top paid book applications on those devices in just two weeks. The Questia collection, consisting mostly of copyrighted works, now totals 76,213 full-text books and over 2.7 million journal, magazine and newspaper articles.

Questia Library for the iPhone/iPod Touch is currently available from the App Store in iTunes, giving users permanent access to 5,000 public domain books and one week of access to every publication in Questia Library. After one week, users may purchase additional access to the full library through iTunes on a non-recurring basis.

Questia Media partners with over 325 publishers to provide an online academic library and research resource to end consumers on a subscription basis. Students, instructors and lifelong learners in more than 200 countries are projected to use Questia's collection of full-text books and articles for scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences.

In a recent survey of over 3,400 Questia subscribers, 25 percent had reportedly said that accessing research material from a handheld mobile device was important. In view of this trend, various publishers and publishing software firms are increasing their focus on this market. XML content server provider Mark Logic Corporation recently announced that the American Institute of Physics (AIP) has used its server to launch its new mobile e-reader application, iResearch. iResearch was developed to provide the AIP community with mobile access to physics journal content.

In August, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) International launched e-books on mobility engineering technology. To acquire an e-book, customers can purchase a downloadable file from SAE International and the content is delivered to their personal computer or hand-held device, such as the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader or Apple iPhone.

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Online library provider Questia Media, Inc., US, has announced that it has made its entire collection available through a new research application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The application, called Questia Library, provides mobile access to the full text of 74,000 books and over 2 million journal, magazine and newspaper articles. The collection consists mostly of copyrighted works and is selected and organised by professional librarians to facilitate academic research in the humanities and social sciences.

The application makes browsing for research purposes easier, allowing users to quickly navigate Questia's subject category schema and drill down to one of 6,700 research topic pages where they can view the top librarian-recommended books and articles for that topic.

In addition to having mobile access, Questia Library users can log in to their accounts through any computer with an Internet connection and access Questia's full suite of research tools to create project folders, quote and cite publications, generate automatic bibliographies, bookmark pages, add items to a bookshelf, take digital notes, and highlight text. The bookmark, bookshelf, and view highlight features are available in the application now with the other tools scheduled to release in a later version.

Questia Library for iPhone/iPod Touch is now available, giving users permanent access to 5,000 public domain books and 1 week of access to every publication in Questia Library.

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Baker & Taylor’s YBP Library Services has announced that it is co-sponsoring CIBER’s library survey with ebrary, a US-based digital content products and technologies provider. Based on input from more than 170 librarians worldwide, the CIBER survey will examine electronic resources challenges, trends and best practices in tough economic times.

The survey questionnaire will be available to all libraries later this month. Results will be announced at the Charleston Conference, scheduled from November 4-7 in Charleston, SC.

CIBER has published a number of studies regarding digital information use, ejournal use and impact, cultural heritage online, impact of electronic course texts, information-seeking behavior of business students, and the like. Its expertise lies in mapping, monitoring and evaluating of digital information systems, platforms, services, roll-outs and environments, using robust, big picture and innovative research methods, especially deep log analysis.

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Online reference library Credo Reference, US, recently signed an agreement to integrate four key Springer Science+Business Media encyclopaedias into the Credo General Reference collection. With a focus on science, technology, medicine, architecture, business and transport, Springer Science+Business Media publishes books, journals and internet products for the global academic and professional markets.

The full-text, aggregated, high-quality content of four important Springer reference works will now be integrated into Credo Reference’s award-winning platform. These include the Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology; the Encyclopedia of Public Choice; the Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender; and the Encyclopedia of Women's Health.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 1999. Credo’s General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide.

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Online reference library Credo Reference, UK, has announced that just after a year since it released its new platform, it has substantially expanded the academic content available on the platform. These are available at no additional cost for Credo Unlimited customers.

Some of the highlights of the augmentation of Credo’s content in the past year are: 173 new subject encyclopedias and dictionaries; 10 new publishers; and coverage of 15 core undergraduate subjects. Currently more that 150 Credo titles are found in Choice’s list of ‘must-have’ titles for US colleges and universities (Resources for College Libraries). More than 25 existing titles were updated at no expense to customers.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 1999. Its General Reference and Specialist Reference services seek to combine content from multiple publishers with cross-referencing technology, delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide.

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Digital content products and technologies provider ebrary, US, has announced that five new publishers have joined ebrary's Half-Off Sale, adding over 1,800 eligible titles to the industry's biggest cost savings programme of the year. The most recent publishers to make backlist titles available through ebrary at 50 percent off list price through December 15, 2009, are ABC-CLIO/Greenwood, Informa Healthcare, IOS Press, John Benjamins, and University of British Columbia Press. To date 35 publishers have signed up to participate in ebrary’s new programme.

More than 51,800 titles are now available through ebrary's first-of-its-kind sale from publishers such as Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, Wiley, Springer, and many others. The selection may be previewed at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/librarytitles1/home.action.

ebrary offers a growing selection of more than 170,000 digital books, handbooks, reports, maps, journals and other valuable content from over 350 of the world’s leading publishers under flexible subscription, purchase, and usage-based models. Additionally, the company offers e-publishing services for customers to cost-effectively distribute their own PDF content online on ebrary’s servers or their own. With this new initiative, ebrary is offering an opportunity for libraries, corporations, and other organisations to purchase and own authoritative content at discounted rates from an esteemed group of renowned publishers. Simultaneously, the company is providing participating publishers with new revenue opportunities for their backlist selections.

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British Library, the national library of the UK, has announced plans to extend its ‘New Ways of Reading’ display to encourage users to investigate new reading technology from the moment it is released. Under the initiative, the library is showcasing the Bloomsbury Library Online, a new service which allows readers to borrow e-books from their public libraries. Also, three new e-reader devices are on display. These include the COOL-ER reader and Sony’s ‘Pocket’ and ‘Touch’ Reader devices - not available in shops until September 10.

With the arrival of services such as the Bloomsbury Library Online - being showcased on the upper ground floor of the British Library from September 3 – readers will soon be able to view electronic content at their local library and remotely via Internet enabled devices. Run by Bloomsbury Publishing, this online service provides access to shelves of popular material by theme.

As well as demonstrating how content is being made available, the Library has added new hardware to its e-reader display. On August 26, Sony launched its two latest editions to the Sony Reader family at the Library. These allow users exclusive access to these two new models, now part of the display, before they are released in the shops on September 10. Easy to navigate with a single hand and small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, the Reader Pocket Edition is claimed to be ideal for commuters. The new models from Sony are joined by the ultra-light, user friendly COOL-ER Reader, designed by small British firm Interead. Offered in a range of colours, Interead has created a dedicated e-bookshop for the devices to make the upload process as simple as possible and bring e-readers to the non-technologically inclined masses.

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Digital content products and technologies provider ebrary, US, has announced that 14 new publishers have joined its Half-Off Sale, bringing libraries, corporations, and other institutions the best cost savings of the year on full-text e-books. To date, more than 21 publishers have signed up to participate in ebrary’s new programme including Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, IGI Global, Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley. Others are expected to sign up shortly.

The most recent publishers to make backlist titles available through ebrary at 50 percent off list price through December 15, 2009, are Brill Academic Publishers; Brookings Institution Press; Channel View Publications/Multilingual Matters; Continuum; Hunter Publishing; M.E. Sharpe, Inc.; National Science Teachers Association; Peterson Institute for International Economics; Smithers Rapra; Temple University Press; Thorogood Publishing; University of Chicago Press; University of Michigan Press; and W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

ebrary offers a growing selection of more than 170,000 digital books, handbooks, reports, maps, journals and other valuable content from over 350 of the world’s leading publishers under flexible subscription, purchase, and usage-based models. Additionally, the company offers e-publishing services for customers to cost-effectively distribute their own PDF content online on ebrary’s servers or their own. With this new initiative, ebrary is offering an opportunity for libraries, corporations, and other organisations to purchase and own authoritative content at discounted rates from an esteemed group of renowned publishers. Simultaneously, the company is providing participating publishers with new revenue opportunities for their backlist selections.

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Digital content products and technologies provider ebrary, US, has announced a first-of-its-kind programme that brings libraries, corporations, and other organisations the best cost savings of the year on full-text e-books from leading publishers across the globe.

Under the Publisher Half-Off Sale programme, institutions around the globe can save 50 percent off list price when they purchase as few as 15 to 25 backlist titles from a single participating publisher through December 15, 2009. The vast majority of these titles are unavailable in Academic Complete or other ebrary subscription products. To date, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, IGI Global, Springer, Taylor & Francis, University of North Carolina Press, and Wiley have joined the programme, with additional publishers expected to participate shortly.

ebrary offers a growing selection of more than 170,000 digital books, handbooks, reports, maps, journals and other valuable content from over 350 of the world’s leading publishers under flexible subscription, purchase, and usage-based models. Additionally, the company offers e-publishing services for customers to cost-effectively distribute their own PDF content online on ebrary’s servers or their own. With this new initiative, ebrary is offering an opportunity for libraries, corporations, and other organisations to purchase and own authoritative content at discounted rates from an esteemed group of renowned publishers. Simultaneously, the company is providing participating publishers with new revenue opportunities for their backlist selections.

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Online reference library Credo Reference, UK, has signed an agreement with academic publisher SAGE Publications, UK, to provide titles from SAGE' Key Concepts and Key Thinkers Series on the Credo Reference platform.

Written by experienced and respected academics and with a focus on the higher education market, these new titles will provide Credo Reference users with information on key concepts in a variety of disciplines. SAGE's titles are well-complemented in Credo, enhancing the cross-referencing across Credo's more than 400 titles and millions of entries. The SAGE Key Concepts and Key Thinkers titles that will be integrated include 50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies; Key Concepts in Critical Social Theory; Key Concepts in Early Childhood Education and Care; Key Concepts in Medical Sociology; and Key Thinkers in Psychology.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 1999. Credo's General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide.

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The British Library, the national library of the UK, has announced the appointment of Frances Brindle as the British Library's new Director of Strategic and Marketing and Communications (SM&C). Brindle started in her role on June 8, 2009.

As Director of SM&C at the British Library, Brindle will be responsible for developing campaigns that build the brand reputation and image of the organisation with its key audiences in increasingly complex and dynamic times. To maintain its position in such circumstances, this role includes managing a diverse range of projects from supporting the Library's increasing digitisation activity and proposition development to implementing fundraising campaigns as well as overseeing the communications, exhibitions and marketing activities of the Library.

Frances Brindle will report to Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive British Library.

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Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) has announced that a new digital library and search engine created by its researchers now holds more than 1 million journal articles and other scholarly works that can be easily accessed by anyone.

CiteSeerX (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu), based in Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), is designed to enhance the dissemination of scientific literature by making papers and other documents easier to locate online. The library provides resources such as algorithms, data, metadata, services, techniques and software that are transferable to other digital libraries - supplying users with more than just an index of search results. The newest version, released in early 2009, added the capability to search tables.

The search engine was developed by C. Lee Giles, David Reese professor of information sciences and technology and Isaac G. Councill, a Penn State Ph.D. recipient. It is based on open source software, which means it can be adapted as needed, by anyone, to fit users' requirements.

The search engine also includes a feature called MyCiteSeerX, a customisable personal space where the individual user can do tagging, make corrections, create his or her own collections and monitor paper updates.

Other tools currently being developed include Our CiteSeerX, an environment where collaborating teams can work and share information within the library, and a feature that will allow users to receive alerts about new papers of personal interest.

CiteSeerX was funded by the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, NASA and the College of IST.

Digital content products and technologies provider ebrary, US, has announced the availability of new collections in Engineering and Business under flexible subscription and purchase models. These collections can be enhanced with purchases of individual titles and discounted bundles as well as a corporation's own mission critical documents submitted into the ebrary system.

Additionally, ebrary has announced the recent expansion of its corporate sales team with the appointment of Matt Shill as Director, North American Corporate & Government Sales. Shill has over 14 years of sales management experience with companies such as EBSCO Publishing, Ovid Technologies and SirsiDynix.

ebrary now offers subscription databases of technical handbooks, e-books, manuals, reference works and other materials from publishers such as Pennwell, CRC Press, AMACOM, Elsevier, McGraw-Hill Professional and John Wiley & Sons.

Corporations may enhance their subscriptions by purchasing pre-packaged subject bundles or choosing from more than 100,000 titles available for purchase individually. They may also use the same ebrary system to integrate their own content (manuals, handbooks, reports - anything in PDF). ebrary's e-publishing services are available as a hosted solution or developer toolkit.

Online reference library Credo Reference, US, has announced a Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA) with the Federal Library and Information Network (FEDLINK), to provide its online service to participating US federal libraries at a discount.

FEDLINK acts as a purchasing and resource-sharing consortium for federal libraries and information centers. With this new agreement, participating institutions are eligible for discounted pricing on subscriptions to Credo's collection of cross-searchable entries, all on one innovative and enhanced interface that also provides seamless searching from Credo into other library resources.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 1999. Credo's General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide.

E-research and educational publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, US, has announced the renewal of a contract with the Connecticut State Library. The contract covers the delivery of a broad range of Gale resources via iCONN.org - Connecticut's research engine that provides students, faculty and state residents with online access to library and information resources.

The previously available Gale resources include Academic OneFile, Business & Company Resource Center and Health & Wellness Resource Center. The new contract will additionally provide residents with access to Science Resource Center, History Resource Center: US, History Resource Center: World, What Do I Read Next?, and 50 e-reference books.

The e-reference books cover a range of topics including history, literature and world cultures. Science Resource Center is a curriculum-oriented resource focusing on such topics as earth science, life science and space science. History Resource Center: US seeks to put the tools of the historian in the hand of the student and general researcher covering US history from pre-colonial times to the present. History Resource Center: World is an online collection of full-text periodicals, reference works and primary source documents covering world history topics from pre-antiquity to the present. What Do I Read Next? identifies similarities in various books, helping the reader to make a new selection.

Using iCONN.org, users will have easy access to their entire collection of electronic resources through a one-search homepage which leverages Gale's PowerSearch technology.

The British Library, the national library of the UK, is giving readers the chance to test drive three e-readers from Sony and iRex Technologies currently available in the UK. The e-reader display will give visitors the chance to familiarise themselves with these new devices and to freely explore the possible recreational and research benefits of the e-book revolution. Devices on display include Sony Reader, iRex DR1000 and the iLiad.

E-readers have seen an explosion of interest in recent months, with leading publishing experts suggesting that the industry has finally hit its 'iPod moment'. The British Library seeks to ensure that readers are equipped with the digital literacy skills to be able to use such technology and thrive in the 21st century research environment.

Traditionally, e-readers have struggled to compete with the traditional book due to issues with low battery life and the use of harsh back-lit screens. Overcoming these obstacles through the use of e-ink technology, e-reading devices are more capable of satisfying reader expectations and can deliver a variety of additional functions such as the ability to vary font size, access WiFi and make annotations.

The e-readers on display have been pre-loaded with material currently available on the market. However, in the future, the British Library hopes to exploit e-reader technology to facilitate access to its own digital collections, allowing readers to explore rare and often out of print items. These include the 80,000 editions of 19th century English literature recently digitised in partnership with Microsoft.

Cornell University Library, a US-based academic research library, has announced that it will no longer require its users to seek permission to publish public domain items duplicated from its collections. Instead, users may now use reproductions of public domain works made for them by the library or available via web sites, without seeking any further permission.

Cornell, as the producer of digital reproductions made from its collections, has in the past licensed the use of those reproductions. Individuals and corporations that failed to secure permission to repurpose these reproductions violated their agreement with the library.

The immediate impetus for the new policy is Cornell's donation of more than 70,000 digitised public domain books to the Internet Archive (details at www.archive.org/details/cornell).

Institutional restrictions on the use of public domain work, sometimes labelled 'copyfraud', have been the subject of much scholarly criticism. The Cornell initiative goes further than many other recent attempts to open access to public domain material by removing restrictions on both commercial and non-commercial use. Users of the public domain works are still expected to determine on their own that works are in the public domain where they live. They also must respect non-copyright rights, such as the rights of privacy, publicity and trademark.

Cornell will continue to charge service fees associated with the reproduction of analog material or the provision of versions of files different than what is freely available on the web. All library websites will be updated to reflect this new policy during 2009.

Key figures in UK education and research recently met at the British Library to explore the tensions and opportunities surrounding the role of copyright law in an increasingly digital knowledge economy. A panel drawn from the fields of publishing, libraries and higher education provided a range of perspectives on how copyright might best support innovation, education and research in the online environment.

The debate was chaired by the Chief Executive of the British Library, Dame Lynne Brindley. Other speakers included Dr. Annette Davidson of the University of Edinburgh, speaking about access to content for academics and researchers; Sir Alan Langlands, Chief Executive of HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England); Stephen Crowne, Chief Executive of BECTA; and Kate Harris, Divisional MD of Oxford University Press, offering the publishing perspective.

The event was the latest in a series of discussions and debates facilitated by the British Library. The Library is seeking to promote a wide-ranging and balanced public debate on how intellectual property regulation can best serve the public interest in the digital age.

Bookshare, US, an online accessible library for individuals with print disabilities, has announced partnerships with leading publishers in the US. Two dozen publishers have signed agreements with Bookshare to provide digital content, which over time will add tens of thousands of books in accessible formats to the Bookshare collection. Publishers who have signed agreements with Bookshare include O'Reilly Media, Random House, Scholastic, HarperCollins, Brookings Institution Press, De Capo Press, Modern Language Association of America, The Hachette Book Group and Townsend Press.

Agreements with publishers, many of which include permissions to distribute worldwide, will add a wealth of accessible books to Bookshare, including academic, scientific and technical books; and textbooks for students in grades K-12, higher education, graduate school, and continuing education. By providing Bookshare with digital files, publishers can rely on the organisation to distribute books to qualified individuals and fulfill their compliance obligations under the Chafee Amendment of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 U.S.C. § 121).

Using proprietary conversion tools, Bookshare can easily convert EPUB (e-book standard) files and other formats received from publishers into accessible formats such as DAISY 3.0 (Digital Accessible Information System) and BRF (Braille Ready File), saving publishers the time and expense of producing accessible formats. A further benefit of partnering with Bookshare is the Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology that Bookshare adds to every book downloaded by a member to protect publishers' copyright interests and guard against illegal sharing.

Bookshare's collection includes more than 46,000 titles and is growing at a rate of over 1,000 books per month from contributions from publishers, universities, downloads processed from the NIMAC (National Instructional Materials Accessibility Center), and scanned books contributed by volunteers. The Bookshare library is expected to increase to over 100,000 books by 2012 with publisher and university contributions augmenting the books from the extended volunteer and nonprofit network.

Online reference library Credo Reference, US, has announced that it has added Sheila Corral, Erin McKean and Ray Lester to its corporate advisory board. The three latest Advisory Board members will each contribute their distinctive perspectives, providing input culled from years of work in their respective fields.

With the addition of Sheila Corral, Head of the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, Credo's advisory board now has leading library science academics from both the US and the UK in its circle of advisers. University of Sheffield was recently recognised as having the top-rated library and information science programme in the UK.

Erin McKean, CEO of Wordnik, is the first lexicographer to join Credo's advisory board. Her experience includes being editor of 'Verbatim' and, most recently, Chief Consulting Editor for American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press.

With Ray Lester joining Credo's advisory board it will now include the two most influential reviewers of reference works in the English speaking world. Ray Lester is Editor in Chief of The New Walford: Guide to Reference Resources. The first volume of this multi-volume work reviewing the best reference sources on the market won a special commendation in 2005 from CILIP.

Credo Reference has been offering completely customisable reference collections for libraries since 1999. Credo's General Reference and Specialist Reference services combine extensive content from multiple publishers with unique cross-referencing technology, effortlessly delivering authoritative answers to millions of researchers worldwide.

The Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre has announced that everyone in Canada with access to the Internet will now be able to view the full content of The Cochrane Library, an on-line resource that provides evaluations on health treatments.

The Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre, in partnership with the Canadian Health Libraries Association, has successfully secured a national license to The Cochrane Library. The license provides a subscription for every Canadian with access to the Internet to benefit from the immense volume of health information found in The Cochrane Library. While this new access will help inform health consumers, healthcare providers will also benefit from this pilot project. Healthcare practitioners will save valuable time to research the best patient treatment options through easy access to this wealth of health information.

The Cochrane Library contains high quality health care information, including Systematic Reviews from The Cochrane Collaboration. These Reviews bring together research on the effects of health care and are considered the gold standard for determining the relative effectiveness of different interventions.

The Cochrane Collaboration (http://www.cochrane.org) is a UK registered international charity and claims to be the world's leading producer of systematic Reviews. It has been demonstrated that Cochrane Systematic Reviews are of comparable or better quality and are updated more often than the Reviews published in print journals.

e-content services and technology provider ebrary, US, has announced that it has been appointed by JISC Collections to supply e-book content and delivery platform for its multimillion-dollar e-books for Further Education (FE ) Project. Under the terms of the contract, negotiated in partnership with the company's authorised distributor 2info, the JISC will fund a collection of over 3,000 multidisciplinary e-books from ebrary and use ebrary's technology to deliver the content to over 440 Further Education colleges in the UK. Participating colleges may also supplement this collection by purchasing additional titles through a framework agreement.

E-books in the collection were selected by librarians and instructors from FE institutions for relevancy to the curriculum, including content of special interest to colleges in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The multidisciplinary database features titles from leading publishers such as Berg Publishing, Elsevier, Hodder Education, John Wiley & Sons, Pearson Education, Springer and Taylor & Francis.

Additionally, JISC Collections and ebrary will create five new collections, to be made available annually through 2014, of the top 100 e-books chosen by the FE community from ebrary's growing catalogue of over 100,400 titles available for purchase. Participating colleges can pick and choose individual titles to develop a custom collection for its specific needs that will be delivered alongside the centrally funded core collection.

E-book technology firm ebrary, US, has announced that customers can now use the Shibboleth authentication system to access any of the company's integrated products. These include e-books licensed under subscription and purchase models; ASP e-publishing services for distributing digitised documents online; and ISIS, its standalone e-publishing system that runs on customers' servers, behind their firewalls.

Shibboleth allows libraries and other organisations to control and manage individual access to protected online resources offered by the institution, third-party vendors, or both. End-users can be authenticated for multiple electronic resources using a single username and password.

As with the Athens system, end-users that access ebrary through Shibboleth will have personal bookshelves automatically created for them, allowing them to use folders to organise and manage entire documents as well as highlights and notes. ebrary also offers additional tools that enhance the research process, such as a choice of viewing technologies, including QuickView for instant document viewing in a browser; InfoTools that integrates content in the ebrary system with additional resources in the library and on the web; multiple options for searching and navigating; and automatic citations when text is printed or copied and pasted, with a URL hyperlink back to the source.

Safari Books Online, a US-based e-reference joint venture between publishers O'Reilly Media, Inc. and Pearson Technology Group, has announced that it has expanded into German-speaking markets by launching the Safari Books Online German Basic Tech Library. The German Basic Tech Library currently offers over 200 titles for corporate teams with German-speaking developers and IT professionals and will grow by several hundred additional titles by the end of 2009.

The German books featured in the library are published by the top technical publishers in Germany. These include Markt+Technik Verlag, Addison-Wesley Verlag, O'Reilly Verlag, dpunkt Verlag, and Wiley-VHC Verlag. The content from all publishers but Wiley-VHC Verlag is exclusively available in subscription form through Safari Books Online. The books included in the German Basic Tech Library have been written by leading German-speaking subject matter experts and in many cases address the specific needs of European technologists. In addition, subscribers to this library can access thousands of English-language books and videos.

Safari Books Online features the ability for users to download a book and take it with them on a mobile device. Once subscribers have access to Safari Books Online, they can simply access the books they want to read remotely through a special mobile interface or iPhone bookbag application - and take Safari Books online with them wherever they go.

E-book technology firm ebrary, US, has announced that it is partnering with three book distributors to make its e-books and other digital materials available to academic libraries in Europe and Israel under various subscription and purchase models. The company's new representatives are Massmann Internationale Buchhandlung in northern Germany; Dietmar Dreier Wissenschaftliche Versandbuchhandlung in southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland; and Ziur Information Systems Ltd. in Israel.

Massmann International Booksellers was founded in 1989 by booksellers Dorothea and Kay Massmann in Hamburg and has operated since then as supplier and service provider for university and research libraries in Germany. The company specialises in the worldwide procurement of books, monographic continuation orders, databases and e-books.

Dietmar Dreier is focused on university libraries, research institutions and other scientific libraries. It specialises in the supply of monographic titles and monographic periodicals from all over the world. Dealing with e-content has increased the range of titles Dietmar Dreier supplies.

Ziur Information has been in the information business in Israel since 1978. It is mainly active in information management within organisations and in marketing and distributing academic and scientific information. The information management activities include information work flow within the organisation, archives construction and management, operating a large microfilm and imaging service bureau, and hardware & software supply for these activities. Ziur also distributes in Israel academic and scientific information as per customer preference and need: online databases, journals and books in printed and electronic versions, information on microform and dissertations & theses from around the world.

ebrary seeks to help libraries, publishers and other organisations disseminate information to end-users, while improving end-user research and document interaction. The company has developed a flexible e-content platform, which customers may use in a number of different, integrated capacities.

Information services company Baker & Taylor, Inc., US, has launched the first phase of its integrated digital media distribution platform through a strategic worldwide licensing partnership with US-based e-book technology firm ebrary.

The partnership enables Baker & Taylor to develop its own digital content products and services, as well as to integrate tens of thousands of e-books and other titles that ebrary has aggregated from more than 350 leading publishers. The new Baker & Taylor digital media distribution platform will be seamlessly integrated to efficiently deliver physical and digital content across its broad customer markets.

ebrary seeks to help libraries, publishers and other organisations disseminate information to end-users, while improving end-user research and document interaction. The company has developed a flexible e-content platform, which customers may use in a number of different, integrated capacities.

ebrary is a leading provider of e-content services and technology. The company helps libraries, publishers, and other organizations worldwide disseminate valuable information to end-users, while improving their research and document interaction. ebrary customers may purchase or subscribe to e-books and other content under a variety of pricing and access models, and they may license the ebrary platform to distribute, sell, and market their own content online. All options are delivered using a customizable interface and include a choice of ebrary Readers with QuickView for instant viewing in a browser and InfoTools software which provide contextual searching and integration with multiple online resources.

ebrary currently offers a growing selection of more than 170,000 e-books and other titles from more than 350 leading publishers and aggregators.

Scotland's university researchers are set to benefit from Scottish Higher Education Digital Library (SHEDL), a shared digital library that will widen access to over 1,500 specialist journals and publications. JISC Collections negotiated this pilot scheme, which will be led by the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries. Three academic publishers - Cambridge University Press, the American Chemical Society and Springer - have already signed up.

The initiative, seen to be the first of its kind in the UK, is also expected to encourage collaboration between institutions as it gives researchers access to journals on the fringes of their chosen disciplines. SHEDL is considered vital to the development of Scottish-based research, over half of which was rated internationally excellent or world-leading in last month's Research Assessment Exercise.

SHEDL has been backed by all of Scotland's higher education institutions, who hope it will support research, learning and teaching. It is also expected to stimulate research both across different disciplines and between institutions.

ProQuest, part of Cambridge Information Group, US, has announced that the full suite of ProQuest Central database products is now available to members of the Institute of Information Science (IZUM) throughout Slovenia through a subscription arrangement. The breadth of content in ProQuest Central is seen to be well suited to meet the information needs of IZUM's growing community of university, high school and special libraries.

ProQuest Central is projected as the largest aggregated full-text database in the market currently, totalling more than 11,600 titles, of which 8,700 titles are in full text. The licence agreement with IZUM is expected to both enable access to content for academics, and help subscribing institutions throughout Slovenia attract the best researchers from around the globe. It follows a similar agreement made recently in Bulgaria.

From primary scholarly journals, popular trade publications, company reports and dissertations to newspapers, newsletters and newswires, ProQuest Central seeks to provide global coverage of a wide range of disciplines. It also provides full-text content from several leading publishers across the world, including full-text titles from Cambridge University Press and Dow Jones. Current and international content is provided in over 160 subject areas including business and economics, medical and health, news and world affairs, science, education, technology, humanities, social sciences, psychology, literature, law and women's studies. ProQuest Central also seeks to offer sophisticated content indexing and platform features.

The Urban Libraries Council (ULC), US, a membership organisation of North America's premier public library systems and the corporations that serve them, is continuing its search for a new president and chief executive officer. The ULC launched its search in late 2008 and will continue it throughout the first quarter of 2009, expanding to a broader audience of potential candidates.

The Council is seeking an individual with imagination and a creative envisioning of the future of urban libraries, balanced with a CEO's ability to bring that vision to life.

The Executive Search Committee is being led by ULC board member Bob Martin, former director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and supported by SC Search Consultants. Losinski has said that the committee and board are taking a deliberate approach to ensure ULC keeps up its pace of successful initiatives and membership growth. ULC has grown by 29 percent in the past four years and launched programmes such as Foresight 2020, aimed at helping libraries quickly adapt to changes in their environments. Additionally, ULC has taken a more active role in the global library community, dramatically expanded member learning opportunities, published timely research and fostered physical and virtual networks among the membership.

E-book technology firm ebrary, US, has announced the availability of its 2009 Starter Packs. Now offered in 21 subject areas, ebrary Starter Packs make it easier and more affordable for libraries to purchase high-value, front-list e-books and other titles from publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, and Taylor & Francis.

ebrary Starter Packs include 25 to 60 essential e-books that are not available in any ebrary subscription database. Librarians and other information professionals may purchase Starter Packs in their entirety at a discount, or use them as selection tools to pick and choose individual e-books. The 2009 Starter Packs do not duplicate titles from the packages introduced in 2008, enabling customers to affordably and efficiently build and enhance their e-book collections. Additionally, libraries and other organisations may complement the Starter Packs with individual e-books from ebrary's growing selection of over 81,300 titles available for purchase.

In the past few months, ebrary has added over 6,300 new titles to its purchase offering, with strengths in History & Political Science; Language, Literature, & Linguistics; Life Sciences; Medical; Physical Sciences; and Religion, Philosophy, & Classics. As with other ebrary products, Starter Packs and individual purchased titles offer tools to help end-users quickly find, access, and manage digital information including multiple search options, personal bookshelves, highlighting, annotating, automatic citations, and seamless integration with other ebrary databases and online resources in the library and on the web through ebrary InfoTools.

E-book technology firm ebrary, US, has announced that it has been chosen to conduct the 2009 E-book Think Tank at the ER&L09 Conference, held February 9-12, 2009, in Los Angeles, CA.

In addition to covering successful innovations regarding e-books and electronic content, panelists will discuss how libraries can integrate electronic content across multiple vendors and platforms. They will also address the functionalities and technologies needed to achieve cohesiveness and make content accessible and useful for their end-users.

Moderated by ebrary CEO Christopher Warnock, the panel includes Xan Arch, Acquisitions Librarian at Stanford University; Caroline Crouse, Electronic Resources Librarian at George Washington University; Kat McGrath, Serials Librarian at the University of British Columbia; and Kristen Anderson, Collection Development Librarian at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

ebrary seeks to help libraries, publishers and other organisations disseminate information to end-users, while improving end-user research and document interaction. The company has developed a flexible e-content platform, which customers may use in a number of different, integrated capacities.

The British Library is hosting a digital conference called the Digital Lives Research Conference at the British Library in London February 9-11, 2009. The event, hosted by the Digital Lives Research Project and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, will examine how libraries and archives can support individuals who wish to organise, preserve and transfer their personal digital archives.

On February 11, virtual delegates can join the conference on the Elucian Islands, the Second Life home of Nature Publishing Group and Macmillan Publishers. The programme for the day focuses on the web, and is oriented towards life online and online lives. Topics range from virtual worlds and iScience to cloud computing. Speakers include Dame Wendy Hall DBE and Nature Publishing Group's Timo Hannay. The day finishes with polar explorer Ben Saunders talking about 'Digital Life at the Extremes'.

The conference is free to attend on February 9 and 11, registration is required as space is limited. There is a registration fee of £35 for February 10, but waivers are available. Interested parties can register at http://www.bl.uk/digital-lives/conference.html.

The Digital Lives Research Conference takes advantage of the Elucian Islands meeting and conference facilities for science groups, universities and businesses. The Elucian Islands promote communication and collaboration by providing a fully functional virtual conference facility, with practical and technical support available.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has released a guide titled Campus-based Publishing Partnerships: A guide to critical issues, by Raym Crow. The guide is the core of a new website, the Campus-based Publishing Resource Center, designed by a panel of advisors from the library and university press communities to support successful publishing partnerships.

It has been observed campus publishing partnerships can offer universities greater control over the intellectual products that they help create. But to fully realise this potential, partnerships need to evolve from ad hoc working alliances to stable, long-term collaborations. The new guide will help partnering organisations to establish practical governance and administrative structures; identify funding models that accommodate the different financial objectives of libraries and presses; define objectives that advance the missions of both the library and of the press, without disrupting the broader objectives of either; and demonstrate the value of the collaboration to university administrators.

Campus-based Publishing Partnerships will also help libraries, presses and other campus units to structure successful partnerships and to recognise when collaboration is not the right course of action. The guide reviews current library-press initiatives, describes the potential benefits of partnerships, and provides an overview of the financial and operating criteria for launching and sustaining a successful collaboration. It provides practical guidance on structuring a publishing partnership, including case studies that illustrate key concepts.

SPARC is releasing Campus-based Publishing Partnerships in conjunction with the launch of the new web-based 'Campus-based Publishing Resource Center' at http://www.arl.org/sparc/partnering. The resource center currently features case studies, a bibliography, and a listserv as well as the SPARC guide. In cooperation with its editorial board, the site will be expanded to include FAQs, sample planning documents, an index of collaborative initiatives, and other content suggested by the community.

OverDrive, a US-based digital distributor of e-books, audio books, music and video, has announced that Cleveland Public Library has become the first public library to offer e-book downloads in the industry standard EPUB format. More than 8,500 libraries powered by OverDrive will also soon be able to offer e-books in the EPUB format, along with over 150,000 titles in audio book, e-book and video formats. Many of these are compatible with both Mac and iPod.

OverDrive distributes thousands of EPUB e-books from top publishers. All EPUB e-book downloads from the OverDrive-powered library download website are borrowed just like a print book. A library customer can browse a library's digital catalogue for titles, check out a title with a library card, and download the e-book to his or her home computer. The titles can be transferred from the library customer's home computer to a Sony Reader PRS-505 (with proper firmware installed) or PRS-700 using the Adobe Digital Editions software. At the end of the lending period, the file automatically expires and Adobe Digital Editions prompts the user to delete the title from his or her computer.

Readers at both Cleveland Public Library and CLEVNET member libraries can check out and download EPUB e-books from the library's download website. Patron-defined lending periods will also be available for the first time at Cleveland Public Library site, http://emedia.clevnet.org. The new feature allows libraries to offer a variety of borrowing options, such as 7, 14, or 21 day lending periods. Fast readers can now select a shorter checkout time, allowing them to borrow more titles from their library. Patron-defined lending periods, EPUB e-books and other upcoming enhancements will be demonstrated at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting 2009 on January 23-26.

EPUB is a reflowable, XML-based format for e-books and other digital publications developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum and adopted by several publishers and technology firms as the industry standard for e-books. OverDrive, an IDPF member company, is claimed to be the only library download service supporting EPUB and integrating the format into a single platform for delivering digital audio books, e-books, music and video to library customers.

Earlier this month, STM publisher Hindawi Publishing announced the addition of EPUB to its online platform for all of its journal and book publications. The new digital format is expected to allow the publisher to produce and make available a single digital file that combines the benefits of the high fidelity typography typically found in PDFs along with the benefits of XML structured content, high resolution images, scalable vector graphics, and font embedding.