WorldCat, an online database of resources available through libraries around the world, has announced that it has reached another major milestone with the addition of its 2 billionth holding.

On May 4, at 2:58 a.m. MDT, the holding symbol for the University of Alberta Libraries, in Edmonton, was set through an automated process to the WorldCat record for the e-book, Evaluation of the City of Lakes Family Health Team Patient Portal Pilot Project: Final Report, published in 2012 by the Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research. It was the 2 billionth holding set in WorldCat. The e-book catalogue record was created by the Canadian Electronic Book Library and was enhanced through OCLC's automated authority control processing system.

WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information created and continuously updated by some 25,000 OCLC member libraries around the world. Its records describe specific works and contain a listing of institutions that own an item, referred to as 'holdings'. Institutions use holdings information to create local catalogues, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work.

WorldCat was created in 1971 so that libraries could share cataloguing information from a central database, increasing workflow efficiency and the ability to locate and loan materials. It took the OCLC cooperative almost 34 years, from August 26, 1971 to August 11, 2005, to add 1 billion holdings in WorldCat. It has taken just seven years and eight months to add the next billion holdings.

WorldCat spans six millennia of recorded knowledge, from about 4800 B.C. to the present. It encompasses records for books, serials, sound recordings, musical scores, maps, visual materials, mixed materials and computer files.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has announced the launch of the ASME Digital Collection (formerly the ASME Digital Library) on SCM6, an online publishing platform from Silverchair Information Systems. It is expected that the platform will provide expanded accessibility and discoverability for ASME's e-books, journals and conference proceedings by leveraging the latest in semantic technology and a host of other features and functionality.

The Silverchair SCM6 platform is said to feature a wide range of applications and capabilities which includes new taxonomy, full text and taxonomic search capabilities, new topical collections and enhanced content display and tools. The other features include improved usability, information discovery and ease of reading, personalisation capabilities and optimised viewing.

ASME seeks to help the global engineering community develop solutions to real world challenges. Silverchair delivers advanced semantic technologies, publishing platforms, and e-learning solutions to scientific, technical and medical publishers, professional societies and the federal government.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and Chinese engineering portal EEFOCUS have announced a partnership that will see the IET’s essential engineering intelligence made available to over 1 million researchers and academics throughout China. A sample selection of articles from the IET Digital Library will be available free of charge and researchers will also be able to access article abstracts from the IET Inspec bibliographic database. The move is part of the IET's mission to make engineering content available to as wide a global audience as possible.

Under the agreement EEFOCUS members will be able to access up to 30 IET Inspec abstracts per month, spanning a broad range of specialisms from across the technology and engineering fields. Access will also be given to up to 10 IET journal articles from the IET Digital Library translated into Mandarin and selected from relevant journals such as Wireless Sensor Systems, Radar, Sonar & Navigation and Computers & Digital Technologies.

EEFOCUS has over 1 million registered users and acts as an information portal for the electrical engineering community in China. It provides an important reference link to relevant books, journals and other materials and provides a forum where users can discuss industry topics. In partnership with the IET, it will add leading academic research to its offering.

The IET zone on EEFocus is due to go live in January 2013 and will be available via the EEFOCUS homepage - www.eefocus.com

Library information provider OCLC, US, has signed new agreements with leading publishers around the world to add more e-book metadata to WorldCat, a comprehensive online database of resources available through libraries worldwide. This new WorldCat metadata will be integrated into library management workflows using OCLC's cataloguing services and discoverable by users through a variety of library discovery services, including WorldCat Local and WorldCat.org.

The e-book providers with whom OCLC recently signed agreements to add new collections to WorldCat are: Cambridge University Press, Chandos Publishing, Edward Elgar Publishing, Ltd., eLibros, McGill-Queens University Press, Momentum Press, Slipdown Mountain Publications, Society of Exploration Geophysicists, Woodhead Publishing Limited, and World Scientific Publishing Co.

OCLC continues to add new journal, book, database and open access collections to WorldCat. WorldCat offers access to the collective resources of libraries worldwide, including print and electronic forms of books, journals and databases from a variety of publishers and other content providers from around the world; the digital collections of groups like HathiTrust and Google Books; and open access materials, such as the OAIster collection.

Library information provider OCLC, US, has announced that it has expanded its strategic partnership with Goodreads, the world's largest site for readers and book recommendations, to help provide greater visibility for all libraries.

The new agreement pledges to improve Goodreads members' experience of finding fresh, new things to read through libraries. It will also provide libraries with a way to reach this key group of dedicated readers through social media. As a WorldCat.org traffic partner since 2007, Goodreads has sent more than 5 million Web referrals to WorldCat.org.

A webinar for librarians and library staff members is planned for November 15, 2012 at 2:00 pm ET. Speakers from both Goodreads and OCLC will provide details of the partnership, including the new functionality available on Goodreads. A Goodreads staff member will walk libraries through how to join this global social book site and how to take advantage of hosting discussions, multiple recommendation threads, photos, videos and even reading contests and surveys on the Goodreads group pages. The Webinar is free, but library staff members are encouraged to register.

Library information provider OCLC, US, and the National Library of Poland (Biblioteka Narodowa) have signed an agreement to add 1.3 million Polish library records to WorldCat. WorldCat claims to be the world's largest resource for discovery of library materials and increasing the visibility of these collections for researchers around the world.

The National Library of Poland acts as the central library of the state and one of the most important cultural institutions in Poland. It seeks to protect national heritage preserved in the form of handwritten, printed, electronic, recorded sound and audiovisual documents. The primary task of the National Library is to acquire, store and permanently archive the intellectual output of Poles.

Once the records from the National Library of Poland have been added to WorldCat, they are discoverable on the Web through popular search and partner sites, and through Worldcat.org.

WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information built continuously by OCLC and libraries around the world since 1971. Each record in the WorldCat database contains a bibliographic description of a single item or work and a list of institutions that hold the item. The institutions share these records, using them to create local catalogues, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work. Libraries contribute records for items not found in WorldCat using the OCLC shared cataloging system.

There are currently about 1.4 million Polish records already in WorldCat. It is expected that this new agreement with the National Library of Poland will nearly double the number of Polish records in the database.

Library information provider OCLC, US, has added the records of a group of more than 100 public libraries in the province of Trento, Italy, to WorldCat. This addition significantly increases the number of Italian language records in what is claimed to be the world's largest database of items held in libraries.

The 136 public libraries and branches in the province of Trento together use the Catalogo Bibliografico Trentino (CBT), their regional union catalogue. The CBT holds 1.6 million records, about 1 million of which are Italian-language records, representing 3.6 million holdings. CBT has contributed 1.2 million unique records to WorldCat, and will continue to add records as the catalogue is updated regularly.

It was the libraries' desire to increase visibility of their collections on the Internet, for those who start their search for information often begin through websites like Yahoo! and Google. OCLC partnerships with those and other search providers make it possible for search results to include library materials from WorldCat, one of the world's largest bibliographic databases. From those results, online searchers can find what they need online or at a library close to them.

Contributing records to WorldCat also means that the libraries become members of the OCLC cooperative. As members, they can participate in OCLC's governance and have access to valuable OCLC research, which can help them plan for the future. Also, with their records in WorldCat, libraries can easily utilise other OCLC services in the future, from integrated discovery with WorldCat Local to cloud services via the OCLC WorldShare Platform.

OCLC, a US-based non-profit, membership, computer library service and research organisation, has published bibliographic linked data for the most widely held works in WorldCat. This downloadable file - representing nearly 1.2 million resources - contains about 80 million linked data 'triples,' the term for the most granular relationship possible between discrete pieces of information.

The linked data is provided as RDF serialisation, and uses the Schema.org ontology as well as library extensions to Schema.org that OCLC has been working on with members and partners over the last year. It is being made available, under an ODC-BY data license, in a single, 1-gigabyte, compressed (GZip) file, which can be downloaded from here.

While WorldCat contains bibliographic records for more than 275 million items, the choice was made to select the most widely held materials for this release in order to help keep the file at a manageable size.

In June 2012, OCLC added Schema.org tags to WorldCat.org records, improving the way in which library information is represented to search engines. OCLC has also developed linked data resources for the Dewey Decimal Classification System, FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) and the VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) service. The release of these 1.2 million records as linked data is the next step in OCLC's linked data strategy.

OCLC, a US-based nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organisation, is recommending the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY) for member institutions that would like to release their library catalogue data on the Web.

This open data license provides the means for users to share WorldCat-derived data in a manner that is consistent with the cooperative's community norms defined in the 'WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities.' Data can be freely shared subject only to attribution and OCLC's request that those making use of WorldCat derived data conform to the community norms.

The recommendation follows passage of a resolution by OCLC Global Council in April 2012 that endorsed the ODC-BY, and recommended that OCLC staff consult with opinion leaders and stakeholders for further input. After researching and experimenting with different data licenses on OCLC and WorldCat data projects, and in close consultation with the library and developer communities, the recommendation was adopted by the OCLC Board of Trustees.

Best practices in the Web environment include making data available along with a license that clearly sets out the terms under which the data is being made available. Without such a license, users can never be sure of their rights to use the data, which can impede innovation. The VIAF project and the recent addition of Schema.org linked data to WorldCat.org records were both made available under the ODC-BY license.

The ODC-BY license will also be used by OCLC as additional sets of WorldCat data are released, including future linked data projects. Going forward, OCLC will modify related processes and policies in order to make the cooperative's data sharing efforts more consistent with this recommendation.

SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, has announced reduced or frozen subscription prices for subscribers of the SPIE Digital Library. An additional 40,000 articles from 1962-1989 are also being added to the collection, at no additional cost to subscribers.

This is the fourth consecutive year that SPIE has frozen subscription prices for the SPIE Digital Library. With this move, the Society seeks to ensure affordable access to the largest and widely used collection of optics and photonics literature to the greatest number of researchers, and also meet its commitment to address the long-term budgetary pressures facing libraries.

The 40,000 conference proceedings and journal articles to be added to the SPIE Digital Library this summer will extend the digital collection to the beginning of the society's publishing programme which began in 1962. This much-requested and difficult-to-find older content includes pioneering and fundamental technical papers dating from 1962 through 1989.

In addition to its nine journals and over 8,000 conference proceedings volumes, the SPIE Digital Library includes the SPIE eBooks collection containing monographs, tutorial texts, and field guides published by the SPIE Press.

To support researchers in developing or low-income countries, SPIE participates in the eJDS programme of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, providing papers on demand to individual scientists, and the Information Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications PERii programme, providing access to libraries in developing nations at low or reduced rates.

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has announced plans to further expand its digital offering with a significantly redeveloped and enhanced Digital Library.

The new Digital Library, developed on Publishing Technology’s pub2web platform, is designed to improve the speed and ease with which academic and corporate users can access the IET’s 3,000 eBook chapters and 185,000 journal articles, which stretch back to 1872. The redevelopment kick-starts the IET’s major digital strategy and is the first of a number of platform improvements to be announced over the coming months.

Launching later this summer, the Digital Library is part of the IET’s mission to facilitate access to essential engineering intelligence worldwide. All of the IET’s research content will be available on the new platform, including the IET’s newly announced open access journal which will contain articles from some of the world’s leading academics, free of charge. The platform will shortly incorporate access to IET.tv and its archive of 3,500 videos.

New features of the Digital Library will include easier navigation and quicker access to relevant content. It will also allow for greater discoverability, improved librarian and customer support and communication, plus increased authentication options for the user.

E-Libro, a provider of Spanish language e-books delivered on the ebrary platform, has announced that all its e-books will soon be discoverable through OCLC's WorldCat, which is projected as the world's largest library catalogue. WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information built continuously for over 40 years by OCLC and member libraries around the world.

E-Libro has also signed its 150th publisher, Editorial Grupo Destiempos, which joins a number of other Spanish language publishers. The publishers are stated to enhance e-Libro Premium, the company's flagship subscription database, in subject areas such as social science, art and human rights.

E-Libro continues to add more than 900 e-books to its growing subscription database each month. Its Premium service now contains over 48,000 titles, which can be previewed at site.ebrary.com/lib/elibro.

The SPIE Digital Library has announced that its Proceedings of SPIE has ranked among leading journals for the third quarter in a row, as one of the 50 most-used of 50,000 journals in the world.

The SPIE Proceedings, which comprise much of the SPIE Digital Library contents, rank among the top 50 most-used journals out of 50,000 analysed in the Ex Libris bX Journal Popularity Report. The report covers all the sciences and is based on the usage of millions of researchers from numerous institutions worldwide.

SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, a not-for-profit organisation founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies. The Society serves nearly 225,000 constituents from about 150 countries, offering conferences, continuing education, books, journals, and a digital library in support of interdisciplinary information exchange, professional growth, and patent precedent.

Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has announced that it is taking the first step toward adding linked data to WorldCat by appending Schema.org descriptive mark-up to WorldCat.org pages. WorldCat.org now offers the largest set of linked bibliographic data on the Web. With the addition of Schema.org mark-up to all book, journal and other bibliographic resources in WorldCat.org, the entire publicly available version of WorldCat is now available for use by intelligent Web crawlers, like Google and Bing, that can make use of this metadata in search indexes and other applications.

Commercial developers that rely on Web-based services have been exploring ways to exploit the potential of linked data. The Schema.org initiative - launched in 2011 by Google, Bing and Yahoo! and later joined by Yandex - provides a core vocabulary for markup that helps search engines and other Web crawlers more directly make use of the underlying data that powers many online services.

OCLC is working with the Schema.org community to develop and add a set of vocabulary extensions to WorldCat data. Schema.org and library specific extensions will provide a valuable two-way bridge between the library community and the consumer Web. Schema.org is working with a number of other industries to provide similar sets of extensions for other specific use cases.

The opportunities that linked data provide to the global library community are in line with OCLC's core strategy of collaboratively building Webscale with libraries. Adding linked data to WorldCat records makes those records more useful - especially to search engines, developers and services on the wider Web, beyond the library community. This will make it easier for search engines to connect non-library organisations to library data.

WorldCat has been built by thousands of member libraries over the last four decades and claims to be the world's largest online registry of library collections. OCLC will continue to engage the library community and the larger developer communities to research, discuss and inform the progression of linked data projects on behalf of member libraries.

OCLC sees Schema.org as a timely and significant development toward linked data technology adoption that will provide recognisable benefits for libraries. Further demonstrating its role in providing linked library data, OCLC recently announced that the full set of DDC 23 - more than 23,000 assignable numbers and captions in English - is now available as linked data.

Engineers and technical experts association SAE International, US, has completed the beta test phase of its new Global Technology Library – Electric Vehicle database. Set for a full release at the end of June, the database is projected as the prime place to investigate, understand and explore vehicle electrification worldwide. Built on the success of SAE’s Digital Library platform, the Global Technology Library – Electric Vehicle provides perspectives on competitive news; market performance; private and government research; intellectual property developments; and proposed and enforced international regulations.

The types of content will include SAE technical papers and standards, SAE eBooks and SAE magazine content. In addition, the resource will also contain data from sources outside of SAE International, including global regulations, patents and patent applications, news articles and market forecasts and industry reports.

Much of that information will be made available through content partnership agreements between SAE International and other publishers.

The beta test included private reviews and product tests by several industry experts representing OEM’s, suppliers, government agencies and private research labs. Such experts provided feedback during the development phase of the product and the beta testers’ feedback will be incorporated into the final design.

Global library cooperative OCLC, US, and reference databases provider Credo Reference, US, have announced a special collaboration project aimed to increase collection visibility and usage with library users. Credo Topic Pages will now be enhanced with WorldCat results to show local library materials alongside other timely, relevant Web materials.

With this new project, libraries that are both OCLC members and Credo customers will receive Credo Topic Pages at no charge for an introductory period. These libraries - along with current Topic Pages subscribers - will show WorldCat results from libraries worldwide that relate to the topic being searched. Libraries can have their results customised to show only local library holdings in WorldCat, as well as other customisations such as branding and deep links back to their catalogue through this special project.

A campaign announcing this new partnership will feature the tag line, 'We added more data-yours.' It runs through June 30, 2012.

To participate in the programme, libraries that qualify for the WorldCat Search API Key can request it and agree to share it with Credo Reference. Credo Reference will then make the customisations on behalf of participating libraries. All participating libraries will receive usage statistics on their customised Credo Topic Pages at the end of the introductory period.

Global library cooperative OCLC, US, and the CIPE consortium, which comprises 11 university libraries in northern and central Italy, have signed an agreement to load CIPE library records into WorldCat. With this initiative, the consortium seeks to increase visibility of these Italian collections, and enrich the world's largest resource for discovery of library materials.

The CIPE consortium (Consorzio Interistituzionale per Progetti Elettronici - Interistitutional Consortium for Electronic Projects) was founded in 2007 with the objective to promote national and international cooperation, research, standardisation, training and development of services for the consortium members aimed at library innovation and efficiencies of scale. Participating in CIPE are the Universities of Bologna, Florence, Genoa, Modena and Reggio Emilia, Padua, Parma, Pisa, Sassari, Siena, Venice and the Polytechnic University of the Marche. Some items in these collections date back to the 15th century.

The agreement to load the records of these public Italian universities will make them discoverable through WorldCat.org on the Web.

The records of the CIPE universities are in UNIMARC format and will first be converted by OCLC before batchloading is done for each university. Once the records are added to WorldCat, the consortium can take advantage of other OCLC services made available through WorldCat.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, and Bibliotheek.nl, the organisation of Dutch public libraries, have signed an agreement to include the complete collections of public libraries in the GGC, the Dutch shared cataloguing system. The agreement to include collections of Dutch public libraries, signed during the OCLC EMEA Regional Council Meeting in Birmingham, UK, will serve as a foundation for the new Dutch National Library Catalogue, and will make these collections visible through WorldCat.org.

Prior to this agreement, collections from the Dutch National Library, university and college libraries, some special libraries and the 14 largest public libraries were present in the GGC. Many public library collections could not be easily found online. Bibliotheek.nl plans to load records from all public libraries and make them discoverable through WorldCat.org, along with the new Dutch National Library Catalogue (NBC).

Through WorldCat.org, information seekers can find materials freely on the Web from over 10,000 WorldCat libraries worldwide. OCLC has existing agreements with sites like Google and Yahoo!, making it possible for library materials in WorldCat.org to be discovered by people who use these search engines to start their searches. WorldCat.org also offers its users a variety of social networking features.

This agreement includes participation of all Dutch public libraries in the GGC. OCLC discovery and resource sharing services are included in the agreement. Before the end of the year, all public libraries will be in the NBC. Bibliotheek.nl and OCLC are working together to load the bibliographic and holdings data of the libraries in the GGC.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has added 500,000 records to WorldCat from the China Academic Library and Information System (CALIS), a nationwide academic library consortium with a mission to promote, maintain and improve resource sharing among Chinese university libraries and other libraries and institutions. These records represent Chinese publications between 1987 and 2001.

The records have been added to WorldCat to help promote the use of the CALIS collection and use of OCLC resource sharing services in libraries in China, and to maximise each organisation's strengths in enhancing cooperative building and sharing of information resources on a global scale.

The project to load these records into WorldCat completes phase one of a cooperative agreement between CALIS and OCLC. After a year, CALIS and OCLC will evaluate the project, based on cost to both organisations, global impact on scholarship and society, effectiveness of resource sharing and document delivery, and overall impact in libraries.

On October 25, 2011, Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO, and Professor Wu Zhipan, Executive Vice President, Peking University, signed a memorandum of cooperation at Peking University, Beijing, China.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has announced that following a successful five-month trial, the Article Exchange feature is now available within the WorldCat Resource Sharing service and, where available, through an ILLiad add-on. This new feature is available at no charge to OCLC libraries that use WorldCat Resource Sharing and ILLiad Resource Sharing Management Software, and will be offered in WorldCat Navigator, in regions where available, and VDX later this year.

Article Exchange provides a single, secure location where lending libraries can place and borrowing libraries and their users can retrieve requested articles obtained through interlibrary loan. Lending libraries scan documents and upload them to the site and notify the borrowing libraries of the documents' availability. The site generates a unique URL and password for each document. An e-mail button enables the lender to insert the borrower's e-mail address and send the link directly to the library.

Once a file has been retrieved, it remains available for five days or five views. After 30 days, unviewed files will be removed. A file can be picked up a maximum of five times for each URL/password combination. Access to the current experimental site will end on January 31.

An OCLC Resource Sharing and ILLiad Users Group Meeting will be held on January 22 from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. at the Dallas Convention Center, Room D227, during the ALA Midwinter Meeting. For those unable to attend the ALA Midwinter Meeting, OCLC will hold an OCLC Resource Sharing and ILLiad Users Group Virtual Meeting on January 26, from 1:30 to 3:00 p.m., Eastern Time. Interested parties may register for this event through the OCLC website.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, is working with SkillSoft, a SaaS provider of e-learning and performance support solutions for global enterprises, government and education, to add records for the Books24x7 digital book catalogue to WorldCat. WorldCat claims to be one of the world’s most comprehensive databases for discovery of library resources.

SkillSoft's growing selection of over 30,000 titles in a variety of subject areas will be represented in WorldCat with a link to the Books24x7 platform.

In addition, OCLC is loading the Books24x7 collection information into the WorldCat knowledge base, enabling OCLC cataloguing libraries to easily set holdings in WorldCat for the titles to which they subscribe. WorldCat Local authenticated users will then be able to link directly to Books24x7 titles subscribed to and made available by their library from the corresponding WorldCat records.

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The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has endorsed the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) Manifesto for Digital Libraries at its General Conference 2011. The Manifesto provides principles to assist libraries in undertaking sustainable and interoperable digitisation activities to bridge the digital divide - a key factor in achieving the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations.

IFLA President, Ingrid Parent, welcomed the endorsement. IFLA believes that access to information resources supports education and health as much as cultural and economic development. Information about the world's achievements allows all people to participate constructively in the development of their own social environment.

Promoting the free flow of ideas is also one of UNESCO's priorities. Janis KārkliņÅ¡, UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, stressed the importance of digital libraries within UNESCO mandate. He lauded the endorsement of the Manifesto as 'part of the efforts of UNESCO and its partnership with IFLA to develop strategies for the sharing of information'.

The IFLA Manifesto for Digital Libraries is seen to be an important instrument for achieving the objectives of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). Many countries have already created national digitisation programmes, and more are expected to do so. IFLA strongly supports and encourages both national and international digitisation strategies as well as single library and partnership initiatives.

The Manifesto was initiated by former IFLA President Claudia Lux (2007-2009). Prior to UNESCO's endorsement, it was approved by the IFLA Governing Board in 2010 and by the UNESCO intergovernmental programme Information for All (IFAP) in February 2011.

The endorsement enables IFLA members to work with UNESCO Member States within the context of national e-strategies aimed at increasing access to information and development. It provides IFLA members with a stronger foundation on which to lobby for and to implement digitisation activities.

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Cambridge University has published, on a new digital library website, over 4,000 pages of Sir Isaac Newton's most important works. These include an original manuscript containing Newton's famous laws of motion. Also available online publicly is the scientist's own annotated copy of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

First published in July 1687, Principia not only contains the laws of motion but also Newton's law of universal gravitation. It is widely regarded as one of the most significant works in the history of science. The university library will upload almost the whole of its Newton collection available for anyone to view and download over the next few months.

Work on the Cambridge Digital Library began in 2010 with the Newton collection being photographed during last summer. Up to 200 pages were captured each day. Major conservation work had to be carried out on several manuscripts and notebooks before they could be digitised.

The next phase of the project will see works by Charles Darwin and the archive of the Board of Longitude made available online.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has added more than 1.2 million brief bibliographic records to WorldCat.org for materials held by Arab libraries, records that represent the complete catalogue of the Arabic Union Catalog (AUC) maintained in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Each record from the AUC in WorldCat.org contains brief bibliographic information for items held by AUC members with a link to the full record and holdings information in the Arabic Union Catalog.

WorldCat claims to be the world's most comprehensive database of resources in libraries. It currently includes 1.4 million records coded for Arabic language (ara) and more than 710,000 records containing true Arabic script. OCLC member libraries contribute to WorldCat to further access to the world's information through library cooperation.

The Arabic Union Catalog, launched in November 2006, is an initiative of the King Abdulaziz Public Library. The AUC is a non-profit, library services organisation dedicated to providing a cooperative space particularly for those libraries worldwide that collect, manage and disseminate materials written in the Arabic language.

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The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is joining forces with international publishers to offer free access to the ACM Digital Library to help 15,000 Haitian students, researchers, and teachers continue their scholarly activities in computer science. ACM is part of an international effort to rebuild cultural and educational institutions following the destruction wrought by the January 2010 earthquake.

The project, initiated by the State University of Haiti (UEH) and Libraries Without Borders, has resulted in the creation of a digital campus scheduled to open September 28, in Port-au-Prince.

In the short run, the UEH Digital Library will offer simple, easy and immediate access to electronic information resources as part of a larger effort to address the destruction of 11 of the 12 State University libraries in the earthquake. The long-term objective is to establish a University reference library in Haiti, opening the way for quality research, and building sustainable higher education. ACM is one of 20 international publishers who are offering access to high-quality online resources and enabling development of information and communication technologies in Haitian universities.

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Online books retailer Amazon.com, Inc., US, is set to launch a digital book library, for which it is reportedly in talks with book publishers. According to a report published in the Wall Street Journal, the library will enable customers to access a digitised content by paying an annual subscription fee.

Amazon will reportedly add the e-book library to its Amazon Prime Services, which has a $79 annual subscription for a unlimited two day shipping and access to movies and TV shows. The retailer may also look to bundle the service with its new tablet that is expected to release shortly to rival Apple's iPad.

Media reports indicate that the launch of the digital library by Amazon could further harm the print media. It could lower the cost of print books and the demand for them.

Amazon.com was among the group that blocked Google, Inc.'s attempt to digitise millions of books and publications to make it available online. The group included other Google competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo as well as librarians, legal scholars, authors, publishers and technology companies.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has signed an agreement with HathiTrust to integrate the HathiTrust full-text index into OCLC services, enabling member libraries and their users to more easily discover resources from this digital collection through WorldCat.

Under this new agreement, OCLC will be able to integrate the full-text index of HathiTrust collections into services such as WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local. Following integration of the full-text index, users will be able to search beyond bibliographic records to include the full text of these cooperatively built library collections in their searches.

Content from the HathiTrust Digital Library complements member libraries' collections already in WorldCat. Through a single search of WorldCat.org or WorldCat Local, users will now be able to easily find HathiTrust resources and other materials available in their own collections, and in the collections of thousands of libraries around the world that are part of the OCLC cooperative.

The HathiTrust Digital Library brings together the massive digitised collections of partner institutions. HathiTrust 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.

Earlier this year, OCLC and HathiTrust began testing a unique WorldCat Local user interface for discovery of items accessible through the HathiTrust Digital Library. The WorldCat Local prototype for the HathiTrust Digital Library, available to anyone on the Web, was designed and implemented by both organisations in close cooperation as a means to further develop a shared digital library infrastructure. HathiTrust Digital Library records are discoverable through the separate WorldCat Local interface, as well as through WorldCat.org, available on the Web at www.worldcat.org.

OCLC and HathiTrust continue to work 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.

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SAE International has announced that its Digital Library now includes eBooks to bolster its already comprehensive collection of more than 175,000 technical papers, standards, and related publications from SAE International and other organisations.

SAE International's portfolio of eBooks in the SAE Digital Library includes 117 titles. In addition, SAE International offers bundled sets of ebooks on topics such as Engine Testing; Engine & Powertrain Systems; Vehicle Dynamics & Chassis; Brakes; Electronics; HEV; Fundamentals; Safety; Honda R&D Technical Review; and AVL International Commercial Powertrain Conference Proceedings.

The SAE Digital Library's robust search engine and user-friendly interface make it easy to find, download and manage technical information.

eBooks in the SAE Digital Library are available in .pdf format. Electronic versions of the books can be viewed via a personal computer, laptop, or hand-held. Also, some books that were converted to eBooks contained page-sized images or images with small text and customers can increase the font size of the text and the .pdf can always be viewed to insure clarity. With the .pdf format, eBooks are presented as an electronic copy of the printed version.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of the launch of WorldCat, a comprehensive database of resources held in libraries around the globe.

On August 26, 1971, the OCLC Online Union Catalog and Shared Cataloging system (now known as WorldCat) began operation. That first day, from a single terminal, catalogers at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, cataloged 133 books online. WorldCat currently comprises more than 240 million records representing more than 1.7 billion items in OCLC member libraries worldwide.

WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information built continuously by OCLC libraries around the world. Each record in the WorldCat database contains a bibliographic description of a single item or work and a list of institutions that hold the item. The institutions share these records, using them to create local catalogues, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work. Libraries contribute records for items not found in WorldCat using OCLC shared cataloging systems.

Since 1971, 240 million records have been added to WorldCat, spanning more than 5,000 years of recorded knowledge, from about 3400 B.C. to the present. This unique collection of information encompasses records in a variety of formats-books, e-books, DVDs, digital resources, serials, sound recordings, musical scores, maps, visual materials, mixed materials and computer files.

Once records have been added to WorldCat, they are discoverable on the Web through popular search and partner sites, and through WorldCat.org. Records entered into WorldCat since 1971 have been continuously migrated, reformatted and updated to conform to newly issued cataloging standards. They have been touched and enhanced hundreds of times by librarians around the world and by OCLC staff and automated systems.

People can now use their mobile phones to access WorldCat via WorldCat Local, where 4G wireless downloads are 2,500 times faster than the original OCLC network. Wired networks are now 416,000 times faster.

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The SAE International has announced the expansion of its Digital Library to include more than 10,000 historical standards. These historical standards, some dating back to the early 1900s, are available in full-text format, allowing users to search for specific keywords and terms.

SAE's Digital Library claims to be the industry's most comprehensive resource, encompassing more than 175,000 technical papers, standards, and related publications from SAE International and other organisations. The newly added historical standards include more than 3,700 SAE Aerospace Materials Specifications, 3,600 SAE Aerospace Standards, and 2,000 SAE Ground Vehicle Standards.

Historical standards can provide important information and knowledge to mobility engineering professionals. The ability to see the evolution of a standard provides valuable insight into the development and design of specific parts, components, systems, or vehicles. This not only gives engineers an historical perspective on a given standard, but allows them to track general technology trends and patterns over time.

For maintenance engineers, historical standards provide critical access to the specifications required to maintain products with long life cycles. In such cases, engineers need to have the standard that was in place at the time the design was implemented so that they know how to repair or replace particular parts, components, or systems. Historical standards also can be used to train and develop an educated, well-informed engineering staff, especially in organisations where senior engineers retire without having fully transferred their accumulated knowledge.

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Library information provider OCLC Research, US, has announced that the WorldCat Identities Network gives users the opportunity to visually explore the interconnectivity and relationships between WorldCat Identities. WorldCat Identities is a service that provides personal, corporate and subject-based identities based on information in WorldCat.

The WorldCat Identities Network uses the WorldCat Identities Web Service and the WorldCat Search API to create an interactive Related Identity Network Map for each Identity in the WorldCat Identities database. The Identity Maps can be used to explore the interconnectivity between WorldCat Identities.

WorldCat Identities creates a summary page for every name in WorldCat, including people, things, fictitious characters, and corporations. This application was developed primarily by JD Shipengrover, Senior Web & User Interface Designer, and Senior Software Engineer Jeremy Browning.

The prototype is available from the WorldCat Identities Network activity page at http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/idnetwork.

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The Wellcome Library has announced a partnership with information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, UK, to digitise over fifteen thousand volumes from the library's rare book collection as part of the Wellcome Digital Library pilot project. The collection will be made available through ProQuest's new Early European Books (EEB) database – a sister project to the Early English Books Online.

EEB will trace the history of printing in continental Europe from its origins up to 1700. A number of other libraries have already contributed to the project, including the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. The Library will contribute its entire collection of pre-1700 non-English printed books. This includes many rare texts on subjects ranging from alchemy to zoology. Landmark works include the first edition of anatomist Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica (1543), the complete works of surgeon Ambroise Paré (c.1510-1590), Rabanus Maurus's encyclopedia De sermonum proprietate (1467) and a coloured copy of Hartmann Schedel's Liber chronicarum ('The Nuremberg Chronicle', 1493), formerly owned by the artist William Morris (1834-1896).

In addition, the project will also provide access to important continental editions of works by famous English medical authors, such as William Harvey's seminal work on the circulation of the blood, De motu cordis (1628), which was first published in Germany.

This partnership will involve a significant investment from ProQuest. In return for access to the collection, ProQuest will make the entire collection freely available to all UK-based users, and to users in the HINARI group of developing countries. Wellcome Library members will have free access to the collection from anywhere in the world. In addition, ten percent of the collection will be selected by the Wellcome Library to be made freely available to any user worldwide via the Wellcome Digital Library portal. As part of the project, previously uncatalogued (and hence unavailable) material is also being included, giving the new database complete coverage of the library's pre-1700 European holdings.

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SPIE, an international society for optics and photonics, has announced that it is further reducing the prices of its SPIE Digital Library. The Society was among the first publishers to respond in 2009 to economic challenges besetting the research library community by reducing subscription prices.

SPIE is reducing current prices by 5 percent for 2012. SPIE implemented a 10 percent rollback in pricing for institutional subscriptions to the SPIE Digital Library in 2010 to help libraries contain costs, and sustained this by freezing prices in 2011.

SPIE has offered the price rollbacks while expanding services, features, and content for a growing number of companies, universities, and institutes. Looking forward, SPIE will continue adding new content to the library, and is planning a major new platform change and upgrade for launch next year.

This year, new functionality such as 'more-like-this' recommendations was added to the SPIE Digital Library, and the Society began publication of the new Journal of Photonics for Energy, which is freely available in 2011, and available by subscription starting in 2012. In 2010, SPIE added eBooks to the SPIE Digital Library, and launched its open-access journal SPIE Reviews.

The 5 percent price reduction applies to current and new subscriptions to the full SPIE Digital Library, which includes the Proceedings of SPIE and all SPIE Journals, and to topical segment subscriptions. It does not apply to consortia arrangements, for which customised discounts are already applied, however, 2012 prices for consortia will be frozen at 2011 rates. The price reduction does not apply to SPIE eBooks, specially discounted subscriptions or promotional packages, or to institutional subscriptions to journals purchased independently of the SPIE Digital Library.

The SPIE Digital Library claims to be the world's largest resource for optics and photonics research. The collection includes nearly 320,000 journal and proceedings articles published from 1990 to the present, with approximately 18,000 new articles added annually. Topics span the broad interdisciplinary fields of optics, photonics, and imaging, with applications across biomedicine, communications, energy, aerospace, defence, manufacturing, computing, sensors, entertainment, and electronics.

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Computer library service and research organisation OCLC, US, has announced that a record for a book accessible online marked the 10 millionth record added to WorldCat via the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway. The record, titled Task-oriented and Purposeful Robot-Assisted Therapy, was harvested into WorldCat by staff at InTech, an open access publisher located in Rijeka, Croatia.

The WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway provides those with an OAI-compliant repository, like InTechOpen, with a Web-based, self-service tool that makes it possible to self-harvest the metadata of their unique digital content to WorldCat to gain broader visibility. The WorldCat record links to a PDF copy of a book available from InTech's online repository.

InTech's online repository, InTechOpen, is an Open Access repository of InTech's books and journal articles covering the fields of science, technology and medicine. All articles are immediately accessible for download and instantly readable through their online reading platform. At present, the articles are in PDF only, but InTech is currently working on the enhancement of their publishing workflow, and their content will soon be available in a variety of digital formats.

WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information built continuously by OCLC libraries around the world since 1971. Each record in the WorldCat database contains a bibliographic description of a single item or work and a list of institutions that hold the item. Millions of records link directly to digital information resources. Institutions share these records, using them to create local catalogues, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work.

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Computer library service and research organisation OCLC, US, has announced that Brazil's Agricultural Research Corporation, Embrapa, has added more than 470,000 bibliographic records to the OCLC WorldCat database. The database claims to be the world's largest online resource for finding information in libraries.

Embrapa's collection, which focuses on topics such as tropical agriculture, food safety, family agriculture, natural resources, advanced technology and agribusiness, comprises about 315,000 titles in Portuguese; 125,000 in English; and 22,000 titles in Spanish. Nearly 18,000 records will link to full-text documents, most of which come from Embrapa's digital repository, the Informática Agropecuária (Ainfo). There are now more than 2 million Portuguese records in WorldCat.

This is OCLC's first collaboration with Embrapa and comes as part of an ongoing effort to include more resources from Brazil in WorldCat. Prior to initiating this project with Embrapa in 2007, OCLC added more than 34,000 records to WorldCat from IBICT's Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD) Metadata Base. OCLC has also worked in a similar capacity in recent years with Bireme, which added more than 40,000 records from SciELO Brasil, and over 300,000 records from the Latin American and Caribbean Literature on Health Sciences Database (LILACS).

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, and Ingram Content Group Inc. will soon offer a new service option that will provide library users short-term access to e-books not in their collection through WorldCat Resource Sharing and ILLiad.

The new service option, to launch in the coming months, will seek to expand access to library content available through WorldCat Resource Sharing to include access to e-books from Ingram's MyiLibrary e-book collection for a period of up to nine days. E-book loans are fee-based, set at 15 percent of the MyiLibrary price for access to the e-book. The fee is managed through the WorldCat Resource Sharing interlibrary loan Fee Management feature, a service that supports payment of resource-sharing services through the library's OCLC invoice.

Using WorldCat discovery services, library users can find what they need and staff can request access to available e-books in Ingram's MyiLibrary. OCLC is working with Ingram to identify and attach holdings to the MyiLibrary e-books available to users.

To support this e-book access programme, OCLC is adding a new 'Alert' category in the request manager in WorldCat Resource Sharing and ILLiad to inform borrowing library staff that the record requires immediate action. The library user will have nine days from the date the e-book is shipped to use the link before it expires.

This short-term access option delivers e-books to users quickly, so they can begin to use requested titles right away. Once a request is updated to 'shipped' status, it is immediately available for use with no delays for shipping or the time required to pick up a requested print title. In addition, many users access e-books to obtain specific parts of information for research. The MyiLibrary interface lets users search full text of titles to quickly identify the sections they need.

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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 European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, a scientific forum on digital libraries that has been held annually over the past 14 years, will take place on September 26-29, 2011 in Berlin. The conference has now been renamed 'International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries'.

Many academic libraries are actively involved in building institutional repositories of books, papers, theses and other works. Many of these repositories are being made available to the general public with few restrictions, in accordance with the goals of open access. This is in contrast to the publication of research in commercial journals, where the publishers often limit access rights. At the same time, the process of acquiring, creating, processing, retrieving, disseminating and using knowledge, information, data and metadata has undergone significant changes over the past few years. This includes an evolution in the amount and diversity of resources that are available, a social shift in the paradigm of how to experience information, and the rise of globally collaborative and personalised approaches.

The conference is organised by the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Berlin School of Library and Information Science, the Computer and Media Services and the Department of Computer Science). It will seek to bring together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field of digital libraries.

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The libraries of Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University have announced the expansion of Borrow Direct to include the Harvard Library and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries as full partners with services to begin in 2011.

Borrow Direct is an expedited delivery system for books (primarily monographs) between and among the participating libraries. It provides access to and sharing of a collection of nearly 50 million items across the partnership. Faculty, students, and staff of Borrow Direct institutions can request circulating materials directly from the library where they are held, without the need for library staff to intervene in the process. The materials are then delivered to the borrowing patron’s library via commercial courier services within several business days. Borrow Direct has successfully shared approximately 1 million items across the partnership since it was initiated in 1999.

MIT Libraries’ extensive collections in science, math, and engineering, as well as rich specialised collections in a variety of other subjects, will now be accessible through Borrow Direct. Together, Harvard and MIT will reportedly add nearly 20 million monographs to the partnership.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has released a new version of the ACM Digital Library. Building on the breadth and depth of this renowned repository of digital knowledge, the new site simplifies usability, extends connections, and expands content with a wide range of new tools and features. More than 1.5 million users have access to ACM's Digital Library, a readership representing individuals and institutions from over 190 countries worldwide, who download about 13-15 million full text resources annually.

New features in the ACM Digital Library (DL) enable users to browse efficiently by author, publication type, ACM Special Interest Group (SIG), and conference venue. The new DL also integrates extensive visualisation technology that captures details of the more than 150 international conferences and symposia associated with ACM. Among these advances are multidimensional geographic maps that display the expanding global nature of ACM events. The redesigned format also lists conferences alphabetically and chronologically, and links to access the published proceedings of each event as well as authors, acceptance rates, and downloads of presented papers, tables of content, abstracts, source material, and a history of the conference.

The site invites comments from readers and browsers to strengthen ties within the computing community. In-depth information about ACM Special Interest Groups and related conferences is also accessible through the new DL. In addition, DL content has been expanded to include citations for hundreds of information technology books from the best authors and publishers available.

The ACM Digital Library contains comprehensive full-text resources from ACM's vast collection of its own published journals, conference proceedings, magazines, and newsletters, and detailed bibliographic resources from other publishers, including data for every author and article in its archive. It houses ACM publications dating from the 1950s as well as coverage of other publishers starting in the mid-1980s. The DL captures more than three million pages in a visually enhanced format that makes this information conveniently accessible and easily searchable. The DL's new features and structure facilitate information dissemination and sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration for computing professionals, practitioners, researchers, and educators on a global scale.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has announced that the National Diet Library has successfully added 4 million records to WorldCat, an online resource for finding library materials. With this initiative, the Library seeks to make its research resources more visible and accessible to scholars, students and Web searchers worldwide.

In June 2010, OCLC and the National Diet Library announced their agreement to cooperate for the benefit of libraries, library patrons and end users of information services. OCLC staff from Leiden, the Netherlands, and Dublin, Ohio, USA, worked with the National Diet Library staff to create a conversion programme to convert JAPAN/MARC to MARC 21 records. Cataloging staff with language expertise were also critical to the successful data conversion and load into WorldCat.

The addition of Japan's National Diet Library records increases the number of records containing CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) script data in WorldCat by nearly 33 percent.

The National Diet Library has been using WorldCat for current cataloging of Western language materials since 2007. Through the new agreement with OCLC, the Library will contribute the contents of the JAPAN/MARC database, the official national bibliography of Japan, to WorldCat on a regular basis. It will send updates of bibliographic records about four times a year and will provide JAPAN/MARC authority records.

Kinokuniya Company Ltd., OCLC's distributor in Japan for 24 years, helped to facilitate this cooperative effort.

WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information built continuously by OCLC libraries around the world since 1971. Each record in the WorldCat database contains a bibliographic description of a single item or work and a list of institutions that hold the item. The institutions share these records, using them to create local catalogues, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work. Libraries contribute records for items not found in WorldCat using the OCLC shared cataloging system. Since 1971, 200 million records have been added to WorldCat, spanning more than 6,000 years of recorded knowledge, from about 4800 B.C. to the present.

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Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has announced that it will put most of its services online within the next seven years. The initiative is expected to transform the institution into a fully engaged digital organisation.

As part of an overall strategy designed to provide more online public access, LAC will take a multi-faceted approach - adapting services and transforming business processes to make access easier, and increasing online content by switching to digital formats.

LAC sends out about 750,000 photocopies each year in response to client requests. Clients are now requesting digital copies. To better respond to these changing client needs and to contribute to the preservation of the country's documentary heritage, clients will now be able to order digital copies of documents found in LAC's collection. Paper copies will be phased out by April 2011. Digitised documents will be made available through LAC's website for repeat requests. By 2012, LAC will start responding to Access to Information requests by producing digitised records for clients.

The National Union Catalogue provides Canadians with digital access to information about items in library catalogues from across Canada. In order to make this information easier to access and share, LAC is working with contributing libraries to identify common digital search tools. By 2011, Canadians will be able to access the entire contents of the National Union Catalogue, representing more than 30 million entries, using popular online search engines.

Electronic theses and dissertations are seen to offer good access to academic research. The Theses Canada Portal at LAC looks to offer one-stop shopping for this area of LAC's collection, but many universities still provide their documents in paper form. By 2014, LAC will only accept theses and dissertations from Canadian universities in electronic form.

Also, over the next year, LAC will double the volume of its online content, mounting millions of genealogy images on its website in partnership with Ancestry.ca. It is also exploring ways to reuse images requested by clients in order to provide a broad range of digital content from the collection online.

By 2017, LAC will therefore acquire and preserve all borne digital federal archival records electronically, making them easier to find and use. Also, it will preserve digital material through a trusted digital repository that meets international standards. This will purportedly safeguard Canada's digital heritage and ensure that it remains accessible to Canadians in the long term, even after the technology which created it has changed.

LAC will introduce these and other changes gradually and at no additional cost by working collaboratively with other memory institutions, government departments, universities, researchers and the publishing community.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has announced that the Biodiversity Heritage Library has added more than 14,000 records of digitised materials, brought together from 12 institutions, to WorldCat. The Biodiversity Heritage Library claims to be one of the world's largest repositories of full-text digitised legacy biodiversity literature.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a consortium of major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organised to digitise, serve and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity. BHL is the scanning and digitisation component of the Encyclopedia of Life, a global effort to assemble information on all living species known to science into one ever-expanding, trusted, Web-based resource.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library will continue to send records to OCLC representing new titles scanned and added to their collection. The records link directly to the BHL Web site to access the full text.

OCLC continues to add records to WorldCat describing digitised and e-book collections of interest to the membership through partnerships with libraries, aggregators, publishers and mass digitisation projects globally. There are currently more than 8 million records describing e-books and digitised books in WorldCat.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has announced that the British Library has added 12 million bibliographic records to WorldCat, an online resource for finding library materials.

OCLC staff worked closely with the British Library staff to add the records over a four-month project. As a result of the cooperative effort, OCLC and the British Library have enhanced the process to add these records to WorldCat for the benefit of researchers worldwide. According to the British Library, WorldCat is an increasingly important resource used to expose its holdings worldwide, and for supporting a number of its core services including resource sharing and document delivery.

Prior to this latest data load, about 4.5 million British Library records had been added to WorldCat over the last 25 years. This volume has now effectively tripled, and the quality and accuracy of the records have been significantly enhanced. Ongoing automated batch loads will further improve the quantity and quality of British Library records in WorldCat.

WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information built continuously by OCLC libraries around the world since 1971. Each record in the WorldCat database contains a bibliographic description of a single item or work and a list of institutions that hold the item. The institutions share these records, using them to create local catalogues, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work. Libraries contribute records for items not found in WorldCat using the OCLC shared cataloging system.

Once records have been added to WorldCat, they are discoverable on the Web through popular search and partner sites, and through WorldCat.org.

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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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Library cooperative OCLC has announced that the WorldCat knowledge base functionality has been integrated into WorldCat services to help library users connect to full-text electronic content, and help libraries to better manage workflows associated with electronic materials.

The WorldCat knowledge base combines data about libraries' electronic content with linking features that enable access to the content. A license management tool allows a library to indicate which journal titles and collections it has the rights to share through interlibrary loan. Together, these enhancements help library staff more efficiently process incoming requests for electronic articles.

WorldCat knowledge base functionality is a new feature included as part of an OCLC Cataloging subscription at no additional charge. Unlike a traditional knowledge base, WorldCat knowledge base data is not tied to a particular application. The data is added and maintained in a single place for use with a growing number of OCLC services. These enhancements will continue to create opportunities for libraries to better manage print and electronic collections together.

WorldCat Resource Sharing and ILLiad subscribers are the first to benefit from the knowledge base integration, providing an enhanced resource-sharing experience for libraries and users. The integration of knowledge base functionality into WorldCat services follows a pilot project with 14 leading academic institutions that began as a test to determine how the knowledge base could facilitate direct request for articles. As the pilot progressed, it became clear that the knowledge base could benefit all WorldCat Resource Sharing libraries, even those that did not offer direct request for articles.

When a user submits a request to borrow an article, a library already holds, library staffs receive a loan request that contains the URL for the item. This not only reduces the number of requests a library makes for things it already owns but it also eliminates the need for staff to consult multiple sources to find the requested item.

WorldCat knowledge base data will soon be available for use with other services. The knowledge base will support a new 'view now' link in WorldCat Local search results, providing users with one-click access to electronic resources such as full-text articles and eBooks. An e-link will be added to brief records in WorldCat Local search results so users will not have to scroll through detailed records to find a link to electronic resources.

Later, integration of OpenURL resolution functionality will further consolidate the discovery and delivery of electronic items into a single interface.

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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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Multinational computer, technology and IT consulting firm IBM, US, and the EU have unveiled a new initiative called IMPACT (IMProving ACcess to Text). The project seeks to provide technology that will enable highly-accurate digitisation of rare and culturally significant historical texts on a massive scale. The latest move is seen to expand the research collaboration of the EU and IBM, which now includes more than two dozen national libraries, research institutes, universities and companies across Europe.

IMPACT is stated to be different from past digitisation projects where the result has been static, online libraries of texts. It will seek to offer new tools and best practices to European institutions to enable them to efficiently and accurately continue to produce quality digital replicas of historically significant texts and make them widely available, editable and searchable online.

Funded by the EU, IMPACT's research utilises new web-enabled adaptive optical character recognition (OCR) software with 'crowd computing' technology - seen to be a fast growing concept designed around individuals, or 'crowds', enhancing a process or product by sharing their knowledge and expertise to dramatically improve its quality and efficiency. Combined, these technologies will allow institutions for the first time to adapt digitisation to the idiosyncrasies of old fonts, anomalies and even vocabularies. They are also seen to reduce error rates by 35 percent and substitution rates by 75 percent.

While today's OCR engines perform well with modern printed texts, the faded ink, age and unusual shapes of older typefaces can lower recognition rates by up to 50 percent and require massive manual post-production review. Consequently, for large-scale projects such as this, the efficiency of post-production review of digitised text is said to be crucial.

At the core of the digitisation project lies a collaborative correction system designed by IBM researchers. It is projected to make it simple and convenient for large groups of volunteers spread over the continent to verify the accuracy of processed texts and correct recognition mistakes using an online web system. Moreover, inherent in the system is the ability to learn from its recognition errors, and adapt automatically to the specific font's characters.

IMPACT technology seeks to streamline, simplify and accelerate the process of winnowing out questionable text scans, enabling reviewers to key in corrections to the text. Instead of displaying an entire scanned page, reviewers only see the actual letters or words in question. In cases where an entire word is suspect, it is added to a collection of other questionable terms, which are then arranged in alphabetical order. Volunteer reviewers need only accept or reject suggested substitutes with one keystroke. In addition, the system uses adaptive dictionary enrichment, a method in which new words are added to a central dictionary based on cross-identification and correction by other users.

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The Wellcome Library has announced the launch of a digitisation project to provide free, online access to its collections, including archives and scientific papers from Nobel laureates Francis Crick, Fred Sanger and Peter Medawar. The creation of the Wellcome Digital Library is expected to throw open the doors of the Wellcome Library and its collections to a worldwide audience. This is seen to provide a global resource for the study of the history of medicine and modern bioscience.

The Wellcome Trust has approved a budget of £3.9 million to begin a two-year pilot project on the theme of Modern Genetics and its Foundations. Drawing on the Wellcome Library's vast collections, content will include 1,400 books on genetics and heredity published between 1850 and 1990, along with important archives. These include the papers of Crick and his original drawings of the proposed structure of DNA.

The aim is to provide a documentary record of modern genetics, not only from a scientific perspective, but also from political, economic, technological, social, cultural and personal viewpoints. In addition to content from the Wellcome Library, up to £1 million of the fund will be used to support digitisation of relevant material from partner institutions in the UK and overseas.

Users will be able to access the repository following completion of the pilot phase of digitisation, slated for September 2012.

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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), US, a technical professional association for the advancement of technology, has announced that it will update the XML Gateway application used to send IEEE Xplore results to federated search engines. This application is used by several federated search vendors to retrieve IEEE documents, and the upgrade features a new and improved gateway that is compatible with the new ENDECA search engine that is used on IEEE Xplore.

If an organisation is using a federated search tool from one of the major vendors i.e. Ex Libris, Serials Solutions, EBSCO, the upgrade will occur automatically. Additionally, if an organisation has created a custom federated search tool for their institution, then the subscriber must update certain parameters to be compatible with the new XML Gateway.

IEEE Xplore seeks to deliver full text access to the world's highest quality technical literature in engineering and technology.

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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 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will further expand universal participation in the World Digital Library (WDL). This was announced by the UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information at the opening of the first official meeting of the WDL partners held in Washington, DC. The meeting elected a 7-member Executive Council, including UNESCO and the Library of Congress in their capacity as ex-officio members.

In connection with this meeting the Carnegie Corporation of New York supported a conference of directors and technical staff from libraries, archives, and museums in 11 countries - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan - to identify important documents and collections from these countries that should be added to the WDL.

Under the same grant, which was awarded in July 2009, the WDL worked with the National Library of Uganda (NLU) to establish a Digital Conversion Center at the NLU in Kampala. This center, the first of its kind in Uganda and one of very few in sub-Saharan Africa, is enabling the National Library to digitise documents relating to the history and culture of Uganda for inclusion on its own website and on the WDL. The items digitised are from the NLU and other cooperating institutions in Uganda. Future activities planned under the grant include efforts to build capacity at libraries in South Africa so they, too can contribute collections to the WDL.

The World Digital Library has now 85 partners from about 55 countries. More than 10 million users worldwide have visited the WDL (www.wdl.org) since its official launch in April 2009.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced a new partnership with LYRASIS, a regional library membership organisation in the US, to provide increased consulting, education and engagement programmes for WorldCat and new cooperative Web-scale library management services. The new partnership will also streamline administrative services that will provide increased efficiencies and cost savings for member libraries.

LYRASIS, created by the merger of SOLINET, PALINET and NELINET, has had a strong, 35-year relationship with OCLC to provide cooperative service, support and advocacy for libraries and consortia. The latest partnership programme, which goes into effect July 1, builds on this foundation to provide member libraries with the next generation of cooperative library services and consulting.

LYRASIS defined a new strategic direction in 2010 to deliver services that help transform libraries, and enhance content, operations and technologies to meet the needs of tomorrow's library users. In support of this strategy, LYRASIS will partner with OCLC and its members to explore next generation bibliographic and resource sharing standards and services. OCLC and LYRASIS will begin providing programmes to support these services in late summer.

OCLC recently announced the availability of Web-scale library management services for early adopter libraries. The new partnership between OCLC and LYRASIS will enable both organisations to better focus on providing libraries with consulting, education and engagement programs. This collaboration will help libraries more effectively deploy the cooperative Web-scale services that move back office operations online, thereby lowering the total cost of ownership for library management services and enhancing the user experience.

OCLC and LYRASIS have jointly created strong administrative practices for ordering, billing, training and support. As technology and new collaboration tools have evolved, OCLC has worked with LYRASIS and other Regional Network Partners to reduce administrative costs while delivering additional online services for members. This partnership includes additional administrative cost reductions for members, and new programmes scheduled to rollout in 2011.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, and digital content products and technologies provider ebrary are working together to add records for the ebrary ebook catalogue to WorldCat. WorldCat claims to be the world's most comprehensive database of library materials.

ebrary's growing selection of over 170,000 authoritative ebooks in all subject areas will be represented in WorldCat with a link to the ebrary platform. Libraries that subscribe to ebrary ebooks can have ebrary set holdings automatically for the relevant records. WorldCat Local authenticated users will then be able to link directly to ebrary ebooks from the corresponding WorldCat records.

Web users searching through WorldCat.org will be able link to the ebrary platform to preview the ebooks and find out how their library might be able to access them. Libraries may choose to share records for their own theses and dissertations, special collections, and other electronic documents hosted by ebrary.

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SPIE, an international society advancing light-based research, has announced that authors of papers accepted for the Journal of Biomedical Optics (JBO) may choose from an expanded suite of open access options now including delayed open access publication. The latest SPIE journal open access option provides JBO authors, who pay standard voluntary page charges in full, with open access for their papers in the SPIE Digital Library beginning one year after publication.

Since September 2009, JBO articles identified as being funded by the US National Institutes of Health are deposited in the open access PubMed Central collection where the full text is available after one year. The service is provided by SPIE at no cost to the author.

SPIE publishes two fully open access journals - SPIE Letters virtual journal and SPIE Reviews. SPIE Letters virtual journal is a collection of letters from all SPIE research journals, in publication since 2006 with voluntary page charges. SPIE Reviews, which launched this year, does not ask for author payment. Both open access journals are published online at no cost to authors. Authors publishing in any of the other seven SPIE journals may ensure immediate open access publication of their papers by paying a per paper fee of $1,500.

New SPIE journal papers are published online in the SPIE Digital Library as they complete peer review and production. The SPIE Digital Library is hosted on the American Institute of Physics' Scitation platform with audio and video multimedia, flexible search, and extensive CrossRef linking features. The library claims to be the world's largest resource for optics and photonics research with about 296,000 journal and proceedings articles from 1990 to the present.

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Library service provider OCLC, US, and the National Diet Library (NDL), Japan, have signed an agreement to jointly make over 5 million records from NDL more visible and accessible to scholars and researchers worldwide through WorldCat. The two organisations plan to cooperate for the benefit of libraries, library patrons and end users of information services. Kinokuniya Company Ltd., OCLC's distributor in Japan for 24 years, helped to facilitate the agreement.

NDL has been using WorldCat for current cataloging of Western languages materials since 2007. The new agreement provides for the contribution of the complete contents of the JAPAN/MARC database, the official national bibliography of Japan, to WorldCat on a regular basis. NDL and OCLC will work together to add the 5 million records to the WorldCat database. Once records are added to WorldCat, they are projected to be more visible and accessible to web users worldwide through WorldCat.org.

WorldCat is claimed to be the world's most comprehensive database of library materials. Updated in libraries and by library professionals around the world at a rate of nearly one new record every second, WorldCat comprises more than 180 million bibliographic records and holdings contributed by thousands of libraries.

Thirty-five national libraries are adding digital images, national files and bibliographies to WorldCat by both batchloading records and online contribution.

Established in 1948, NDL is the only depository library in Japan. It acquires all materials published in Japan, preserves them as national cultural heritage, and provides various types of bibliographic data.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has announced the availability of select ASME Press book titles from 1998 to the present in eBook format on its Digital Library. Starting July 1, ASME will offer, for the first time, 50 titles in eBook format. The Society will add another 50 titles by the end of 2010.

The ASME Digital Library is projected as an indispensable tool for mechanical engineers and engineers across a wide range of disciplines, as well as for scientists in allied fields. With the addition of eBooks, the site now unifies access to all of ASME's eBooks, journals, and conference publications through a single search interface.

ASME eBooks allow the consumer to browse and search thousands of chapter abstracts and excerpts online at no cost. Each eBook is fully searchable on its own or collectively with the ASME online journals and conference papers. eBooks will be available in a diverse range of subject areas including design and manufacturing, engineering management and pipeline engineering.

ASME eBooks are available either through a standard 12-month subscription for 2011 or through a one-time purchase which provides continuous access to all titles. Both options include new book titles as they become available and include all 2010 print publications.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced the National Library of China as a new participant in the OCLC WorldCat Resource Sharing service. Under the initiative, the National Library of China will share its rich collections with libraries and researchers worldwide.

Since November 2009, 2.4 million records from the National Library of China have been added to WorldCat, an online resource for finding library materials. With those records in WorldCat, resources from the National Library of China are more visible worldwide through the Web. Once records from the National Library of China are discovered in WorldCat, researchers and scholars will be able to access and obtain these important Chinese materials through WorldCat Resource Sharing.

The National Library of China, which celebrated its centennial in September 2009, claims to be the largest library in Asia with a collection of 30 million volumes and articles. In addition to collecting and preserving records of Chinese culture, the National Library of China provides document consulting services to leaders of the Chinese government to facilitate their decision making, as well as to support research and teaching in China. Now the library will share its rich Chinese collection with libraries worldwide through WorldCat Resource Sharing.

WorldCat Resource Sharing is a unique set of tools built on the WorldCat database through which more than 10,000 libraries in over 40 countries cooperate to create a global network to simplify interlibrary lending. It provides an integrated set of features that help libraries reduce costs, increase efficiency and quickly satisfy user needs.

OCLC's partnership with the National Library of China began in 1986 when OCLC introduced its CJK system to support cataloguing in Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) scripts. The National Library of China and OCLC formed a partnership at that time to create in WorldCat the National Bibliography of the Republic Era, 1911-1949. The library now uses the OCLC Connexion service to catalogue its newly acquired titles, and participates in OCLC Worldcat.org for exposure of its holdings on the Web.

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The European research project IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) recently entered its second phase by taking up 11 new partners from Southern and Eastern Europe into the consortium. These new partners will seek to contribute to the project's goals of optimising OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software and language technology for historical material and sharing institutional knowledge and expertise on digitisation. Also, they will help to build the IMPACT Centre of Competence. Slated for launch in early 2011, the IMPACT Centre of Competence will provide a central service entry point for all libraries, archives and museums involved in the digitisation of text material.

IMPACT now brings together 26 national and regional libraries, research institutions and commercial suppliers. The project is coordinated by the National library of the Netherlands and runs from 2008-2011. In early 2010 the EC funded a proposal to extend the project's reach, adding nearly Euro 1 million to the Euro 15.5 million original budget. In the current second phase (2010-2011) an additional four national libraries, four research centres and three universities from France, Spain, Poland, Bulgaria, Slovenia and the Czech Republic have been added. The new research partners will work on building historical lexica for their languages, while the libraries will provide datasets.

After the first two years of the IMPACT project (2008-2009), initial versions of tools have been completed, including a set of tools for efficient lexicon building. An important insight was that the work on the individual languages (Dutch, German and English) contributes to the design of these language-independent tools and that adaptations may be needed to extend the applicability of the tools to new situations. Therefore, a key aim of this extension of IMPACT is to arrive at a cross-language view of the accessibility and enhancement of digitised text.

The IMPACT objective is to significantly improve the accessibility of historical printed text. Issues that users and institutions currently face include the fact that material dated before 1900 is difficult to access in a digital form, as the latest OCR software does not provide satisfactory results for old books, magazines and newspapers. Also, libraries, archives and other content holding institutions across Europe lack experience and know-how in the process of digitisation. Additionally, the historical language barrier forms a stumbling block. Together this causes inefficiency and slows down the process of making European cultural heritage available on the Internet.

To overcome these barriers to digitisation, IMPACT plans to innovate in the technology for text recognition and text enrichment. Two industry partners, IBM and ABBYY, are involved in setting up a text recognition system based on an adaptive model which automatically tunes itself to each new book being digitised.

IMPACT will also improve the process of large-scale digitisation by sharing expertise and best practice. For this a number of strategic tools such as a website, help desk, decision support tools and a training programme are developed as well as the sustainable Centre of Competence, where the requirements of content holders across Europe and the interest of research partners inside and outside the project can be matched. The 11 new partners will demonstrate and disseminate IMPACT project results and support building capacity in digitisation in their countries, which will widen the scope of IMPACT considerably across Europe.

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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 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced the launch of the new ACM Digital Library Resource site at http://librarians.acm.org. The new site is expected to serve as a valuable tool for librarians, consortium administrators, subscription agents, and end users interested in learning more about the ACM Digital Library.

The new ACM Digital Library Resource site provides detailed information about ACM publications contained in the DL; features and functionality of the platform; subscription and pricing information for institutional subscribers; end user training and marketing materials; free trial information; and a growing list of other services for existing and new subscribers. According to ACM, it is investing heavily in the development of its cutting edge content delivery platform and scholarly publications. This site is expected to serve as an important resource to keep the library community informed of these developments.

As one of the world's leading technology associations, the ACM was one of the first publishers to launch a full-text database of scholarly literature (back in 1997) and make this database available to subscribers. Over a decade later, the ACM continues to develop, host, and maintain the Digital Library platform itself, which gives the Association the ability to customise the functionality of the platform specifically for the specialised needs of its users in the fields of computer science and information technology.

The ACM Digital Library consists of one of the world's largest databases of full-text articles on computing (over 280,000 articles dating back to 1954) and the field's largest bibliographic database (The ACM Guide to Computing Literature) with over 1,500,000 articles and 8,000,000 references with total DL usage in 2009 exceeding 13,750,000 full-text downloads.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced that there are now more than 16.3 million French records in WorldCat, following completion of batch loading projects from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Système Universitaire de documentation (Sudoc) and the Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon (BM Lyon).

In 2009, the BnF and ABES, the agency that manages the Sudoc database for French universities, signed an agreement with OCLC to load their records and holdings information into WorldCat. OCLC then processed more than 8.8 million records for BnF and over 7.9 million records for ABES. The Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon, the second largest public library in France, contributed more than 1.3 million records to WorldCat.

With these projects complete, there are now more than 16.3 million French-language records in WorldCat. The total number of WorldCat records has grown substantially in recent years. The percentage of French-language records has increased from 6.2 percent in 2007 to 9.6 percent in 2010.

WorldCat is a global network of library-management and user-facing services built upon cooperatively-maintained databases of bibliographic and institutional metadata. WorldCat enhances productivity across the full range of library workflows - from cataloguing to resource sharing to discovery and delivery - by intelligently reusing contributed data. The service seeks to make library resources more visible on the Internet by distributing data across a growing number of partner services and Web technologies.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced that library listings from WorldCat have been added to pic2shop iPhone application. iPhone users can now download the free pic2shop application to scan book barcodes and find local libraries who have them through WorldCat.

The pic2shop mobile application is designed for consumers who like to comparison shop. Users scan a book barcode with their iPhone, and can compare costs to get the book at various retailers or now a local library. The application uses the WorldCat Search API and WorldCat Registry APIs to deliver results for libraries nearby who hold the item in WorldCat, one of the world’s largest library catalogues. Location and mapping information is also available.

Developed by Vision Smarts, a technology company based in Belgium, pic2shop was the first iPhone application that could read UPCs and EANs. It broadens the availability for book barcode-scanning functionality, as it offers a free download and works on all available iPhones - even first generation models. In addition, pic2shop works in all countries, although not all users may have nearby libraries with up-to-date holdings in WorldCat. Vision Smarts is also developing pic2shop applications for additional platforms beyond the iPhone.

The pic2shop iPhone application is one of several mobile applications designed for users to access library information from WorldCat. In addition to applications such as RedLaser for iPhone and Compare Everywhere for Android, the WorldCat Mobile pilot application is available for download on all Web-enabled phones in the UK, US, Netherlands, Germany, France and Canada at www.worldcat.org/mobile.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the University of Virginia Library, the University of Washington Libraries, and the Conference Planning Committee have extended the call for proposals for the 2010 Library Assessment Conference up to February 26. The event, called ‘Building Effective, Sustainable, Practical Assessment’, is scheduled for October 25–27, 2010, in Baltimore, Maryland.

The biennial conference follows the first two conferences held in Charlottesville (2006) and Seattle (2008). Its aims to support and nurture the library assessment community through a mix of invited speakers, contributed papers and posters, workshops and discussion. The event is geared toward library and information professionals and researchers with responsibility for, or an interest in, the field of library assessment. All proposals are due by February 26, 2010.

Proposals are invited as either papers or posters. The Conference Planning Committee especially encourages proposals on the five keynote topics - Library Service Quality, Performance Measures and Balanced Scorecard, Assessment of Library Spaces, Learning Outcomes and the Library and Value and Impact. Related topics are also welcomed. These include digital libraries, Information resources and collections, learning and teaching, management information, methods and tools, organisational issues, performance measurement and measures, return on investment (ROI), services, space planning and utililisation, usability, usage and e-metrics, and user needs.

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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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Internet search services provider Google, Inc., US, has reportedly apologised to Chinese authors for scanning thousands of their books without obtaining permission from them. The books were included in the controversial Google Books project. A statement by Erik Hartmann, the Asia-Pacific head of Google Books, was posted on the website of the Chinese Writers Association. The Association is one of the groups leading accusations against Google.

According to the China Written Works Copyright Society, thousands of books by Chinese authors were added to Google Books. Google originally claimed ’fair use’ protections in copyright law allowed it to show snippets of in-copyright books that it scanned from US research libraries. The project has raised objections from authors and publishers in Germany, France and the US.

The China Written Works Copyright Society is in talks with Google to try to solve outstanding copyright issues and agree terms for compensation. However, Chinese writers have so far refused the company’s offers.

Publishers and authors have been upset with Google posting extracts of their books online without fairly compensating them. In December 2009, a French court ordered Google to pay more than €300,000 in damages and interest and to stop digital reproduction of the material. As part of the ruling, the company was also ordered to pay €10,000 a day in fines until it removes extracts of some French books from its online database. Earlier last year, Google reached a settlement with publisher and authors in the US over a copyright infringement suit filed in 2005. Google agreed to pay $125 million to solve pending claims and establish an independent unit to provide revenue from advertising and sales to authors and publishers who agree to digitise their books. A US judge has scheduled a hearing for February 18 on the revised settlement.

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A French court has reportedly ruled against Internet search services provider Google, Inc., US, in a copyright infringement case filed by a French publisher. According to the court, Google violated copyrights by digitising books and putting extracts online without authorisation.

The court has ordered Google to pay more than €300,000 in damages and interest and to stop digital reproduction of the material. As part of the ruling, the company has also been ordered to pay €10,000 a day in fines until it removes extracts of some French books from its online database. Google claims to have complied with French copyright law and has plans to appeal the decision.

The suit was originally filed in May 2006 by French publisher La Martiniere and later joined by the French authors group SGDL and French Publishers Association. The suit is just one of several filed by publishers and authors who are upset with Google posting extracts of their books online without fairly compensating them. Earlier in 2008, Google lost a lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild. The company was ordered to pay authors and publishers $125 million as compensation then. An amended agreement in November clarified certain changes and updates to the settlement.

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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), US, has announced the launch of its first mobile version of the IEEE Xplore digital library. More than two million documents can now be searched via any mobile device with Internet access.

Using IEEE Xplore Mobile Beta, users can conduct basic search, display the top 10 results by relevancy, and view abstracts and citations. To view the full-text of an article, the user can email the link to any email address and, if they are a subscriber, view the article directly from the main IEEE Xplore Web site on their personal computer. Non-subscribers can purchase the article or subscribe to the IEEE Xplore digital library.

According to IEEE, IEEE Xplore users conduct an average of 200,000 searches a day, and in 2008 made an average of seven million downloads a month or 230,000 a day – up 60 percent from 2004. The growing popularity of using mobile devices for Internet access was a key motivation driving the development of the mobile version. Another impetus for the mobile search option was the popularity of IEEE content. In recent studies by 1790 Analytics LLC, IEEE journals and conference proceedings received more than 117,000 patent citations — nearly 3.5 times the number of citations of any other publisher.

Two million engineers, scientists, students and other technology professionals worldwide have access to IEEE’s 144 journals, transactions, and magazines through individual and institutional subscriptions. In 2008, a record number of authors contributed 171,000 articles – 82 percent more than in 2004. There are also more than 4,300 customer sites, worldwide, accessing IEEE electronic subscription packages.

IEEE is inviting users to send their feedback on this new Beta service. Other enhancements will debut in 2010 based on feedback from Beta users.

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The US federal judge overseeing the Google Books settlement has reportedly granted preliminary approval to the revised settlement. According to the court order, the new version is ‘within the range of possible approval.’ The order also set February 18, 2010 for a final fairness hearing on the agreement, which will restore access to millions of out-of-print books.

According to Google, the agreement promises to benefit readers and researchers, and enhance the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in digital form.

The Open Book Alliance (OBA), a group of parties who oppose the deal, still does not approve of the new terms. It noted that the Justice Dept. has until February 4 to weigh in with its opinion of the revised settlement.

The OBA recently expressed criticism over Google’s revised book settlement proposal. It had sought a settlement proposal that would not grant Google an exclusive set of rights (de facto or otherwise) over the world's largest digital database of books.

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The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced that it has agreed to participate in the Federal Library and Information Network (FEDLINK) of more than 1,000 US Government member libraries to facilitate their access to the ACM Digital Library (DL) (http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm). FEDLINK is the business subsidiary of the Federal Library and Information Center Committee (FLICC).

The agreement enables FEDLINK members to subscribe to the DL at a discounted price and to streamline their access to the DL’s vast online collection of resources, which are used by over 1 million computing professionals and students worldwide. Also, the deal enables ACM to expand efforts to offer the online computing content of its DL to a critical part of the library market. Among the federal libraries that are eligible under this agreement are those maintained by many of the major science, energy, health, defence and intelligence agencies as well as several legislative committees.

This initiative is part of ACM’s ongoing investment in content, features, performance, and the worldwide reach of its Digital Library, which comprises an online collection of more than two million pages of full-text articles from ACM publications as well as one of the most comprehensive bibliographic databases in the computing field. The ACM DL includes an index of more than 7 million references, 1.25 million citations, and over 500,000 journal articles. ACM’s full-text database consists of many of the highest impact titles in the computing field dating back to 1954, and includes content from ACM’s wide range of journals, magazines, conference proceedings, ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) newsletters, technical reports, and multimedia files.

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The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced that it is providing its institutional library customers with advanced electronic archiving services to preserve their electronic resources. These services, provided by Portico and CLOCKSS, are aimed to help the scholarly community obtain reliable, secure, deliverable access to their digital collection of scholarly works. ACM is offering these services to protect the online collection of resources in its Digital Library (DL), which are used by over 1 million computing professionals and students worldwide.

This initiative is part of ACM’s efforts to enhance the content, features, performance and worldwide reach of its DL. By investing in long-term digital preservation of content, ACM aims to make it easier for libraries to accelerate their transition away from print. Libraries are also expected to free up resources invested in print collections in favour of new and innovative electronic products and services.

Portico’s primary preservation methodology is migration, which involves transitioning content from one file format to another as technology changes and as file formats become obsolete. Its archival approach begins with receipt of source files, which comprise the intellectual content of electronic scholarly journals, directly from publishers. It then offers transformation or ‘normalisation’ of these diverse files to a standard archival format which can be reliably managed over the long term.

CLOCKSS uses archive nodes, which are housed at libraries selected to be the custodians of the archived content, and at institutions that have existed for a very long time. Archive nodes are located in geographically, politically and geologically disparate locations in North America, Europe and Asia. The CLOCKSS archive is governed by the participating publishers and libraries, and supports the library's role in society as a ‘custodian of culture.’

The ACM Digital Library comprises an online collection of more than 2 million pages of full-text articles from ACM publications as well as one of the most comprehensive bibliographic databases in the computing field. The ACM DL includes an index of more than 7 million references, 1.25 million citations and over 500,000 journal articles. ACM’s full-text database consists of many of the highest impact titles in the computing field dating back to 1954. It also includes content from ACM’s journals, magazines, conference proceedings, ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) newsletters, technical reports and multimedia files.

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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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The Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) have signed a three year agreement to bring together the knowledge of UK library professionals with JISC’s expertise in digital technologies. The two organisations will work towards a vision of everyone having equal access to the widest range of resources supporting research, learning and teaching.

Themes to be explored jointly by SCONUL and JISC will include the changing library systems landscape - ‘a road map for strategic development of UK library systems’; policy and strategic development for digital content and related infrastructure for libraries; access and identity management; the changing scholarly communications process; and supporting the user experience.

SCONUL represents higher education libraries in the UK and Ireland. The organisation and JISC have worked on a number of joint projects and initiatives, including JISC’s recent report on the ‘Impact of the economic downturn on University Library and IT services’. The report looked at librarians’ key concerns during the economic downturn. Such reports are expected to allow SCONUL to better understand the thoughts of members.

JISC has announced various initiatives to expand access to research data. Earlier this month, it announced that it had become a founding member of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). COAR is an international not-for-profit association that aims to promote greater visibility and application of research outputs through global networks of open access digital repositories.

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The European Commission (EC) has adopted a ‘Communication on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy’ aiming to tackle the important cultural and legal challenges of mass-scale digitisation and dissemination of books, in particular of European library collections. The Communication was jointly drawn up by Commissioners Charlie McCreevy and Viviane Reding.

Digital libraries such as Europeana will provide researchers and consumers across Europe with new ways to gain access to knowledge. For this, however, the EU will need to find a solution for orphan works, whose uncertain copyright status means they often cannot be digitised. Improving the distribution and availability of works for persons with disabilities, particularly the visually impaired, is another cornerstone of the Communication.

Commissioners McCreevy and Reding stressed that the debate over the Google Books Settlement in the US once again had shown that Europe could not afford to be left behind on the digital frontier.

The Communication addresses the actions that the EC intends to launch: digital preservation and dissemination of scholarly and cultural material and of orphan works, as well as access to knowledge for persons with disabilities. The challenges identified by the EC stem from last year’s public consultation on a Green Paper, the EC’s High Level Group on Digital Libraries and the experiences gained with Europeana.

The EC will now hold talks to find viable solutions for simple and cost-efficient rights clearance covering mass-scale digitisation and the online dissemination of library collections still protected by copyright. This concerns both out-of-print works and orphan works.

The digitisation and dissemination of orphan works pose a particular cultural and economic challenge. The absence of a known rightholder means that users are unable to obtain the required authorisation. The EC will now examine this phenomenon more in detail via an impact assessment. The aim is for an EU-wide solution to facilitate the digitisation and dissemination of orphan works and the establishment of common 'due diligence' standards to recognise orphan status across the EU.

In addition, a stakeholder forum on the needs of disabled persons, in particular visually impaired persons, will examine policy responses, including ways to encourage the unencumbered EU trade of works in accessible formats.

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The European Union launched the EU Bookshop Digital Library at the recently concluded Frankfurt Book Fair. Twelve million scanned pages in more than 110, 000 EU publications are now available free of charge for download in the EU Bookshop Digital Library. The digital library offers all publications edited by the Publications Office on behalf of the EU institutions, agencies and other bodies since 1952.

The Publications Office Digital Library was a response to a growing demand to digitise out-of-print publications. In 2007, the Publications Office launched a PDF-on-demand service, wherein users could request publications to be retrieved from the archives and scanned as needed. The demand was so high that within six months the service was saturated. To better serve the users, it was decided to scan the industrial volumes of the entire archive.

The result – less than two years later – is an electronic library of more than 14 million pages of web-optimised PDFs available to the public free of charge. It consists of the 12 million scanned pages of historic publications and about 2 million pages of recent publications. At the rate of 1600 new publications per year, EU Bookshop is projected as a valuable information source for citizens, journalists, education professionals, students, librarians, publishers, and anybody interested in Europe, in about 50 languages, including the possibility of ordering printed copies.

EU Bookshop content will also be accessible via Europeana, a digitisation project of many prominent national European libraries and archives.

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Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), a tool devised by the worldwide publishing community to help make copyright work on the web, is being upgraded for the first time since it was first released in November 2007. ACAP Version 1.1 has been released with the aim of making it easier for publishers, search engine operators and other aggregators to implement the tool.

The new version includes a number of clarifications, as well as new features which, it is hoped, will broaden the appeal of ACAP. The most significant change is in providing explicit rules for how aggregators should interpret some of the more complex forms of expression in ACAP. It has now been made clear that, where an aggregator is unable (for whatever reason) to interpret a complex permission expression as the publisher clearly intended, the alternative is to interpret the expression as a prohibition. This is expected to help avoid the risk of using the publisher’s content in ways that the publisher had not intended should be permitted.

New features include a number of extensions to the ACAP vocabulary. Using the PLUS Coalition’s License Definition Format, it will now be possible to indicate when permissions data is embedded in a photograph. The new enhanced version also makes it possible to express constraints upon the presentation of content to end-users based upon their location (country, domain name, IP address range).

ACAP has been developed by World Association of Newspapers, the International Publishers Association and the European Publishers Council in collaboration with publisher participants and search engines. In February 2008, MPS Technologies, the technology arm of Macmillan India, had announced that its e-book platform, BookStore, had been successfully used as part of an intense 12 month ACAP pilot scheme. MPS Technologies developed a test BookStore site for the ACAP pilot - the only publisher participant to focus on e-books - and made a significant contribution to the success of the project. Later, ACAP 1.0 was implemented on 1,600 known websites across 53 countries worldwide.

The ACAP Technology Working Group is now turning its attention to how ACAP can be applied to the growing range of business models for online delivery of copyright content. The next version is likely to add new forms of expression to make ACAP more expressive and flexible, capable of being communicated in a variety of ways and interoperable with a wider range of web content delivery applications.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is offering a five day workshop entitled METS: The Basics and Beyond. To be held in partnership with Nancy J. Hoebelheinrich and Rick Beaubien of the METS Editorial Board, this workshop is scheduled from January 18-22, 2010 in Boston. It is aimed at people who work in digital and physical libraries. Participants can gain knowledge and skills for organising the many and disparate component parts of individual digital resources.

The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is a data encoding and transmission specification expressed in XML. It provides a means for conveying the structural, descriptive, and administrative metadata necessary for both the management of digital objects within a repository and the exchange of such objects between repositories or between repositories and their users. This common digital object format was designed to facilitate both the exchange of digital materials among institutions and vendors, and the shared development of supporting tools.

Although continuous, this workshop consists of three modules, any of which may be taken independently. The first module assumes some familiarity with XML, but no prior experience with METS. The second and third modules build on and deepen a basic understanding of METS. More details on the workshop modules is available online at http://www.arl.org/stats/statsevents/METS-workshop.shtml.

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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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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and IBM, US, have announced a publishing agreement. Under the deal, all papers published in IBM journals will be available exclusively in the IEEE Xplore digital library (www.ieee.org/ieeexplore) from the first quarter of 2010 onwards. The aim is to disseminate key technical articles and papers in computer hardware, software and information systems to a wider audience of researchers and interested readers around the world.

The IBM Journal of Research and Development, which now includes the IBM Systems Journal, is claimed to be one of the top-cited journals in the field. The two, which have been published online since 1998, merged into one fee-based online publication in 2009. The production of future editions of the current publication, the IBM Journal of Research and Development, will be handled by IEEE. IBM will be responsible for the content acquisition and peer review, while IEEE assumes the article production, copy editing, data conversion, online hosting and maintenance.

Users can purchase single IBM journal articles via IEEE Xplore or opt for a subscription package to the entire journal, including all issues ever published, starting in 1957. IEEE members and digital library subscribers also will be able to add the journals to their current subscription packages.

IEEE has been forming publishing and subscription agreements with various organisations. In June 2009, it teamed up with two physics organisations - the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and AVS - to offer a new subscription package. The package is available through IEEE Xplore. Developed for corporations and government research centres, the AIP/AVS Applied Physics Library offers subscribers unlimited access to five journals in applied physics, including archives dating back to 1930.

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The hearing over a settlement between Google and US authors and publishers has been postponed considering objections on copyright and anti-trust grounds. The US District Court Judge Denny Chin agreed with the request from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the US Authors Guild to delay the October 7 hearing on the legal settlement.

The judge's order came on the same day as French publishers and authors took Google to court in France over the book-scanning project. Supported by France's 530-member Publishers' Association and its SGDL Society of Authors, the plaintiffs are contesting Google's campaign to digitise books without prior authorisation of publishers or authors. The French case has been adjourned until December 18.

Facing objections from the US Justice Department and others to the deal, the authors and publishers asked the New York judge to delay the hearing on the settlement. According to the judge, Google and the authors and publishers were in negotiations with the Department of Justice, which "will result in significant changes to the existing settlement agreement."

The request for a delay in the hearing came four days after the Justice Department advised Chin to reject the settlement. According to the Justice Department the book-scanning project has the potential to breathe life into millions of works that are now effectively off limits. The project however raises copyright and anti-trust issues in its current form. The agency encouraged the parties to continue their discussions.

Google and the authors and publishers reached the settlement in 2008 to a copyright infringement suit they filed against the search services company in 2005. Under the settlement, Google agreed to pay $125 million to resolve outstanding claims and establish an independent Book Rights Registry. The registry provides revenue from sales and advertising to authors and publishers who agree to digitise their books.

Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo! have filed objections to the settlement with the court, along with the French and German governments, privacy advocates and consumer watchdog groups.

Earlier this month, the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries and the Association of Research Libraries submitted a supplemental filing with the New York District Court. The purpose of the supplemental filing was to address developments that have occurred since the groups submitted their filing on May 4.

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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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Internet search services provider Google, Inc.’s book-scanning project has been criticised by a group of authors, publishers and the governments of France and Germany, it has been reported. According to them, the plan would give Google too much control over out-of-print books.

The complaints were raised at a EU hearing in Brussels that is reviewing how a $125 million settlement between Google and US publishers will affect the EU. A group that represents Google rivals including Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. has alleged that the deal would create a cartel involving thousands of publishers.

Google is currently working with Oxford University’s library and six others in Europe to scan out-of-print books that are no longer copyright protected. The project, which began in 2004 with books from Harvard University, the New York Public Library and other sources, has digitised over 10 million books. According to Google, the agreement will ‘bring back to life’ millions of books that are moldering on library shelves and will create a new market for out-of-print books.

Germany has called the electronic copying of books without the consent of copyright owners as unacceptable and has asked European regulators to look into how the settlement affects EU rights. German publishers are concerned that their books, which are still commercially available in Europe, would be considered “out of print� if they are not sold in the US. While Germany submitted its objections on August 31, France recently presented objections over the deal to the US court ahead of the October 7 hearing.

The US settlement, which is yet to be approved by a judge, covers orphan works - titles for which no one can be identified to give permission for digital use.

In 2005, Google had been sued by authors and publishers who said their copyrights would be violated by scanning books and making them available online. In October 2008, the company agreed to settle two copyright lawsuits with authors and publishers over its book-scanning service, which could make it the primary source for millions of out-of- print books.

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