The Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) recently submitted comments on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a trade agreement currently being negotiated between the US and the European Union (EU). While negotiations are still in their preliminary stages, LCA urges the inclusion of provisions to harmonize public access to the results of government-funded research. LCA also cautions against the inclusion of an intellectual property chapter in the agreement.

LCA warns that the EU is more protective of copyright and related rights and may try to impose the same restrictions on the US. As a result, libraries might for example, be forced to pay royalties to publishers in order to lend books, something they currently do for free under the first sale doctrine. Any copies currently made under the fair use doctrine might be subject to compulsory licenses.

While it may be possible to negotiate concessions from the EU, these will likely come at a cost to the US. To avoid being forced into a defensive position, LCA recommends that TTIP not address intellectual property.

Library resources provider EBSCO, US, has announced that Shannon Regan, licensed content librarian at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., has been awarded the 2013 North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) Horizon Award. The award, sponsored by EBSCO, recognises a promising new information professional. It covers the cost of travel, registration, and lodging for three nights while the recipient attends the NASIG Annual Conference in Buffalo, N.Y., June 6–9.

Each year, the Horizon Award gives a first-time NASIG conference attendee the opportunity to advance within his or her profession by networking with other attendees from a wide range of fields within the serials information chain, including vendors, publishers, and non-traditional serialists. The award encourages continued participation in NASIG conferences and events, and also includes a one-year membership to NASIG.

Applicants must be first-time attendees of the NASIG Annual Conference and hold a position working with some aspect of serials within the information profession. This year's applicants submitted essays addressing the 2013 NASIG conference theme: "The Art of Information/The Architecture of Knowledge."

EBSCO, which has helped to sponsor NASIG conferences and events for more than 10 years, is participating in the Vendor Expo at the 2013 NASIG Annual Conference on Thursday, June 6.

A series of three advocacy webinars, presented by the AASL Advocacy Committee in conjunction with School Library Month, is now available as part of the American Association of School Librarians' (AASL) professional development archive, eCOLLAB.

Presented in a new 20-minute format, these webinars focus on a single topic and explore AASL advocacy tools attendees need to most effectively promote their programme. The webinar series include: 'Quantity vs. Quality,' presented by Judi Repman; 'A Space vs. A LEARNING Space,' presented by Rebecca Morris; and 'Strong School Library Programs Build Strong Communities,' presented by Andrea Ange and LeeAnna Mills.

AASL members can access the webinar via eCOLLAB by logging into the AASL website using their ALA-provided website login. Non-members who wish to view the webinar and other archived professional development can receive access to eCOLLAB resources with an annual subscription of $199 per year.

eCOLLAB, a repository of AASL professional development, provides members and subscribers with a central location to find and manage their e-learning as well as to connect with others in the learning community. eCOLLAB contains webcasts, podcasts and resources from various AASL professional development events, as well as access to a read-only version of the latest issue of Knowledge Quest.

Fujitsu N.I., an IT systems, services and products company, has won the £25 million managed services contract for Libraries NI, the single Public Library Service for Northern Ireland. As part of the core business applications solution, SirsiDynix, a library technology solutions provider, is partnering with Fujitsu NI for the delivery of the SirsiDynix Symphony Library Management System and Enterprise discovery platform for its content management and discovery tools.

The initiative is expected to transform the library experience for the Northern Ireland public, as well as introduce greater efficiency in backend staff operations.

In addition to the core Library Management System, SirsiDynix Symphony, NI libraries will benefit from a suite of new functionality including SirsiDynix Enterprise Discovery platform for a "one-stop-shop" seamless search experience of the library catalogue, e-resources, digital collections, and Oxford University Press databases; BookMyne+ for the same experience through mobile devices; Social Library, a native Facebook application, enabling end users to search the catalogue, reserve materials and query their account without ever leaving Facebook; and SirsiDynix's own SMS messaging module allowing users to set their own preferences.

Library resources provider EBSCO, US, has announced the release of Social Work Reference Center (SWRC), a resource designed specifically for clinical practice, education and research. The resource is the latest addition to the point-of-care product line from EBSCO.

Social Work Reference Center is a comprehensive reference tool that provides evidence-based information to social workers and other mental health professionals directly at the point-of-care.

Designed to increase the speed and accuracy of decisions and provide the most current evidence for patient care, Social Work Reference Center, will appeal to hospital and healthcare providers, corporate provider networks, religious and non-profit organisations, government agencies, school agencies and institutions that provide social services education programs.

Social Work Reference Center provides the latest evidence-based information through a variety of content types including evidence-based care sheets, quick lessons and skill competency checklists. The resource also includes clinical assessment tools, practice guidelines, drug information, continuing education modules and patient education information.

The evidence-based information provided by Social Work Reference Center stems from a seven-step evidence-based methodology to systematically identify and critically appraise all clinical content. Literature surveillance occurs daily and topics are updated as evidence changes.

The OCLC Global Council met in The Hague, Netherlands, to discuss the opportunities and challenges libraries face in an increasingly global environment and the importance of international cooperation. The Council elected leaders for next year, elected a new trustee, and announced results from regional council elections. It also accepted a report and recommendations by the Global Advisory Group on Credits and Incentives.

It was the first OCLC Global Council meeting to take place outside the US or Canada. Forty-two Council delegates and four alternates from 16 countries and territories participated in the meeting under the direction of OCLC Global Council President ChewLeng Beh, Senior Director, Library & Professional Services and Director of SILAS, National Library Board, Singapore.

Council delegates elected Berndt Dugall, Director/Librarian at Universität Frankfurt's Universitätsbibliothek Johann Senckenberg (Frankfurt am Main, Germany) to the OCLC Board of Trustees. Dugall has served the OCLC membership since 2005 in various Council roles, most recently as Vice President (2010–2011), then as President (2011–2012). His term on the Board will begin in November, replacing Kathleen Imhoff, Library Consultant. In November, 10 of the 16 Trustees serving on the Board will be librarians.

Barbara Preece, Director, Loyola/Notre Dame Library (Baltimore, Maryland, USA), was elected Vice President/President-Elect of the OCLC Global Council. Her one-year term as Vice President will begin July 1, 2013, and her one-year term as President will begin July 1, 2014.

Anne Prestamo, Claud D. Kniffin Professor of Library Service and Education and Associate Dean for Collection and Technology Services, Oklahoma State University (Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA), will begin her term as Global Council President July 1, 2013.

The Global Council accepted a report and recommendations by the Global Advisory Group on Credits and Incentives. Following 18 months of analysis and discussion with members, the report recommends that the Cooperative gradually phase out the Financial Credits Programme through June 2016. The report recognises the important role that the Financial Credits Programme has played in the Cooperative.

The report calls for the continued promotion and celebration of member contribution and sharing, and the need to ensure that the phase-out of the programme minimises any financial impact to members currently participating in the Financial Credits Programme. While the current programme is being phased out, the Advisory Group report said that the Cooperative should support development of new mechanisms that celebrated and encouraged member cooperation and sharing in support of its common purpose of furthering access to the world's information.

The recommendation goes to the OCLC Board of Trustees and OCLC management for consideration.

OCLC's three Regional Councils - Americas Regional Council (ARC), Europe, Middle East and Africa Regional Council (EMEARC) and Asia Pacific Regional Council (APRC) - has concluded elections and announced results during the meeting.

Library information provider OCLC Research has announced that its annual Library Partnership Roundtable will be held on April 27 at ARLIS/NA in Pasadena, CA. This meeting will provide an opportunity for staff from OCLC Research Library Partnership institutions to hear about and influence OCLC Research plans and priorities and to explore challenges that require collaborative solutions.

OCLC Research has staked out some of the most pressing issues facing the library community in the areas of Metadata Management, Advancing the Research Mission, and Mobilizing Unique Materials. Staff from OCLC Research Library Partnership institutions as well as prospective partners are invited to attend this meeting to hear about the latest development in areas of particular impact to art libraries.

The meeting agenda was determined by OCLC Research Library Partners through a survey.

The eBooks on Demand (EOD) project of the EOD Network is one of three projects selected to receive the 2013 American Library Association (ALA) Presidential Citation for Innovative International Library Projects.

The EOD Library Network aims to digitise the public domain books on users' request. It was nominated for the ALA award by a network member, Alenka Kavčič-Čolić from the National and University Library in Slovenia. Among other things, the nomination letter drew attention to EOD network has enlarged by 10 libraries since last three years; the EOD search engine, which was launched in 2011, comprises more than 3.5 million items by now; and the digitised books are made available to the public through the repositories of the participating libraries.

The Citation will be presented on July 1 by Maureen Sullivan, ALA President at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago. It will be received by the coordinator of the EOD network, Silvia Gstrein and a network member, Guy Cobolet from Academic Health Library in Paris.

The ALA Presidential Citation for Innovative International Library Projects began as an ALA Presidential initiative of Dr. Loriene Roy, ALA President in 2007-2008. Recipients are selected by a committee of the International Relations Round Table through a nomination process.

The EOD service provides e-books on demand in a single PDF file mostly with full-text search option. The service was launched by 13 libraries in 8 European countries in 2006 and is currently provided by 35 libraries in 12 countries.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) a grant to support the encoding of a collection of template licences for e-resources into the ONIX for Publications Licenses (ONIX-PL) format. The encodings will be deposited into the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebase for free distribution to the library, publishing and library systems community.

The deposited encodings, made available under a Creative Commons Public Domain (CC-0) licence, will allow libraries that licence electronic content to import the template licences into their own electronic resource management systems for further local customisation to match their negotiated licence and implementation. The project will also fund publicly available training resources that will inform community members on how to use those encodings for their own purposes.

JISC Collections, a division of the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) that manages electronic content acquisitions for member institutions of higher learning in the UK, has already encoded all of the licences for JISC Collections-subscribed content and deposited them in its KnowledgeBase Plus (KB+) database.

While KB+ has reportedly proven a useful tool for institutions in the UK, it has not moved beyond this venue because the encodings produced by the JISC Collections are restricted to JISC members' usage. To encourage ONIX-PL adoption and the use of encoded licences, JISC Collections provided additional funding to support the project and provide training in the encoding format and the ONIX-PL Editing software.

According to Todd Carpenter, NISO's Executive Director, NISO has contracted with Selden Lamoureux to obtain the template licences, encode them in ONIX-PL format, and deposit the files in the GOKb and KB+ knowledgebases.

It has been noted that ONIX-PL is elegant but very complex, since it's designed to describe the nuances of licences which are extremely variable.

Library resources provider EBSCO has appointed Paul Harwood to a new role as General Manager of the UK and Nordic operations for EBSCO Information Services. Paul will officially start with EBSCO on May 30, 2013.

Well known in the library, publisher, and intermediary communities, Harwood has been active on various committees and professional interest groups, including a long association with UKSG, where he was Chair between 2006-2008. He is currently a member of the UK Open Access Implementation Group. Most recently, Harwood has been Deputy CEO of JISC Collections, playing a lead role in their open access activity for journals.

EBSCO provides more than 375 research databases and nearly 400,000 e-books plus subscription management services for 355,000 e-journals and e-journal packages. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals and magazines from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.).

The full archive of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)'s official scholarly research journal, College & Research Libraries (C&RL), is now available for free. The move is seen as part of the association's commitment to scholarly publishing and open access.

The online C&RL archive now contains the complete contents of the journal from its beginnings in 1939 through the current issue. The archive is available through the C&RL website.

C&RL archival contents from 1939 through 1996 were digitised through the volunteer efforts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. The library's Digital Content Creation department performed scanning and metadata creation for the approximately 340 back file issues of the journal in 2011 and 2012. The digitised files were added to the journal's online presence with the financial assistance of the ACRL Friends Fund.

Published since 1939, C&RL enacted an open access policy in April 2011. C&RL will become an online-only publication in Jan. 2014.

Hosted through HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, C&RL's online presence seeks to provide a variety of robust features. Online readers have the ability to comment on articles, share contents through social media and perform basic and advanced searches across C&RL and other ACRL serials. A variety of RSS feeds and e-mail alerts provide notification of the availability of newly posted preprint and issues contents. Articles are freely available to read online or download as PDF files. The mobile-optimised version of C&RL online allows readers to read and interact with articles from their smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices.

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) is inviting proposals for programmes to be presented during the 2014 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference. The conference will be held from June 26 - July 1 in Las Vegas.

The deadline for pre-conference submissions is 11:59 p.m. CDT on May 27, 2013. The deadline for concurrent session submissions is 11:59 p.m. CDT on August 26, 2013. More information is available at www.ala.org/aasl/aaslrfp.

AASL seeks proposals for 60- or 90-minute concurrent sessions and half- or full-day pre-conference workshops. All programmes should include up to three learning objectives and should address how the session supports the AASL Strategic Plan, the AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner and/or Empowering Learners: Guidelines for School Library Programs. The AASL Annual Conference committee will evaluate proposals for clarity, originality and timeliness.

Submissions will only be accepted via the online form located at www.ala.org/aasl/ala14rfp. Email, mail or fax submissions will not be accepted. All questions regarding AASL programming at the 2014 ALA Annual Conference should be directed to Melissa Jacobsen, AASL Manager of Professional Development, at mjacobsen@ala.org or (800) 545-2433, ext. 4381.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released a pre-publication version of an article on 'Open Educational Resources as Learning Materials: Prospects and Strategies for University Libraries,' which will be featured in the forthcoming Research Library Issues (RLI) no. 280.

In this article, authors Marilyn S. Billings, Sarah C. Hutton, Jay Schafer, Charles M. Schweik, and Matt Sheridan provide an overview of open educational resources (OERs), discuss faculty use of OERs as alternatives to traditional resources, and describe the new Open Education Initiative at University of Massachusetts Amherst including the challenges and opportunities it presents. The authors conclude that while assessment of student and faculty satisfaction is still under way, preliminary indications are that both groups are very satisfied with efforts to challenge the existing model of expensive commercial textbooks with a model using OERs.

One-time savings to students of over $205,000 have resulted from an initial investment of $27,000—and these savings will multiply each time the course is taught. Working with faculty and commercial publishers to promote and facilitate the adoption of open educational resources and other hybrid models places the libraries in an excellent position to uphold their public land-grant mission and to gain support from campus administration, parents, and students.

The final version of this article will be published later this month, in the complete issue of RLI 280. RLI is freely available from ARL Digital Publications.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the publication of a new Recommended Practice: Institutional Identification: Identifying Organizations in the Information Supply Chain. This Recommended Practice describes the work done by the NISO Institutional Identifier (I²) Working Group to define the requirements for a standard identifier for institutional identification in the supply chain. It also provides background on the collaboration agreement between the NISO I² Working Group and the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) International Agency to use the ISNI standard (ISO 27729) and the ISNI-IA's infrastructure for institutional identification, rather than publish a separate standard for institutions.

According to Grace Agnew, Associate University Librarian, Digital Library Systems, Rutgers University Libraries, and Co-chair of the I² Working Group, the I² Working Group did extensive community needs assessment with the publishing, library, and repository use sectors. Based on this input, the Working Group developed a minimum set of metadata elements needed to uniquely and unambiguously identify an organisation engaged in a digital information workflow. This metadata was later harmonised with that of the ISNI standard to define the final set of elements.

The Institutional Identification: Identifying Organizations in the Information Supply Chain Recommended Practice is available for free download from the NISO I² workroom webpage: www.niso.org/workrooms/i2.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released ARL Academic Health Sciences Library Statistics 2010–2011, which presents data describing collections, expenditures, personnel, and services in 63 health sciences libraries at ARL member institutions in the US and Canada.

In 2010–2011, the reporting health sciences libraries held a median of 217,811 volumes, spent a total of $240,675,218, and employed 1,977 FTE staff. Expenditures for materials and staff accounted for the bulk of total expenditures, at about 52 percent and 38 percent respectively. Respondents reported spending a total of $101,124,356 for electronic materials, or a median of almost 89 percent of their total materials budgets; this includes a total of $97,504,002 for electronic serials.

The ARL Statistics Collection provides online access to the annual publications ARL Statistics, ARL Academic Health Sciences Library Statistics, and ARL Academic Law Library Statistics that have been published since 2006.

Center for Research Libraries (CRL) and the North East Research Libraries Consortium (NERL), a non-profit program operating under the auspices of Yale University, have come to an agreement to relocate NERL operations to CRL. Under this new arrangement, NERL, which licenses major online products on behalf of 28 member academic research libraries and about 80 affiliates, will be managed as a cooperative program under the CRL organisational umbrella.

For the past two years, CRL has been strengthening its own capacity to support licensing and procurement of electronic resources in areas of traditional CRL collecting strength: news, historical archives, government records and publications, and statistical information. In this effort, CRL has been able to obtain favourable terms for the acquisition of a number of major databases for CRL libraries. This new working relationship will offer CRL and NERL libraries greater leverage in acquiring key electronic resources, and in shaping the terms of access to those resources.

This partnership compares in many respects with the arrangements CRL has with the Global Resources and Area Microform projects. It preserves a high degree of autonomy and self-governance for NERL, while creating synergies between NERL licensing and CRL’s own Global Resources Forum activities.

More details about this new development will be discussed at the CRL Annual Council of Voting Members meeting, which will be a web conference, scheduled for April 19.

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has announced the publication of a new white paper, 'Intersections of Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy: Creating Strategic Collaborations for a Changing Academic Environment,' written by a working group of leaders from many areas of the association.

This white paper explores and articulates three intersections between scholarly communication and information literacy. These include: economics of the distribution of scholarship (including access to scholarship, the changing nature of scholarly publishing, and the education of students to be knowledgeable content consumers and content creators); digital literacies (including teaching new technologies and rights issues, and the emergence of multiple types of non-textual content); and our changing roles (including the imperative to contribute to the building of new infrastructures for scholarship, and deep involvement with creative approaches to teaching).

After elaborating on each intersection, the paper provides strategies for librarians from different backgrounds to initiate collaborations within their own campus environments between information literacy and scholarly communication.

After articulating these intersections and exploring core responses, the paper recommends four objectives, with actions for each, which could be taken by ACRL, other academic library organizations, individual libraries and library leaders. The recommendations are: integrate pedagogy and scholarly communication into educational programmes for librarians to achieve the ideal of information fluency; develop new model information literacy curricula, incorporating evolutions in pedagogy and scholarly communication issues; explore options for organizational change; and promote advocacy.

This white paper is issued as both a downloadable PDF and an interactive online format. Readers are encouraged to add comments and reactions in order to help further the conversation. This white paper complements the recently published ACRL book Common Ground at the Nexus of Information Literacy and Scholarly Communication, edited by Stephanie Davis-Kahl and Merinda Kaye Hensley.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has issued a call for participation in the third Balanced Scorecard (BSC) Initiative cohort. The year-long initiative will engage a small number of research libraries in a systematic way to consider the benefits of applying a locally developed library scorecard. Libraries with a keen interest in continuous improvement and strategic assessment are invited to apply.

The Balanced Scorecard Initiative enables an organisation to focus on a relatively small number of carefully chosen measurements aligned with library mission and strategies to provide a quick, but comprehensive, picture of organisational performance. The BSC examines the organisation from four perspectives: User, Finance, Internal Processes, and Learning and the Future. ARL has worked with a number of libraries over the past four years in using the BSC framework to develop and implement strategy, measure and communicate success, and move the library organization forward during transformative times.

Offered in partnership with Ascendant Strategy Management, the 2013–2014 BSC Initiative will consist of three in-person workshops, 10 conference calls, and access to web-based programme resources.

The US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the publication of maintenance revisions of two widely used standards: The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set and The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol. Both standards were revised to make very minor updates.

The Dublin Core standard defines 15 metadata elements for resource description in a cross-disciplinary information environment and is reportedly used as the basis for most metadata standards in use today. The SUSHI Protocol defines an automated request and response model for the harvesting of electronic resource usage data and is required for conformance with the COUNTER Code of Practice.

Thomas Baker, Chief Information Officer for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, the maintenance agency for the Dublin Core standard, has explained that the DCMI usage board has approved a change to the usage comment for the 'subject' element to eliminate some ambiguity with the 'coverage' element. The new version of the ANSI/NISO standard corresponds to version 1.1 of the specification on the DCMI website.

Oliver Pesch, Chief Strategist for EBSCO Information Services and Co-chair of the SUSHI Standing Committee, has stated that the SUSHI Standing Committee has initiated this revision of the standard to make two minor updates. An additional error code was added and the appendix about security considerations was updated to reflect technology changes and experience gained since the initial implementation of the SUSHI protocol.

Both standards are available for free download from the NISO website; Dublin Core at www.niso.org/standards/z39-85-2012 and SUSHI at www.niso.org/standards/z39-93-2013/.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has announced the release of a beta draft for comments of the ResourceSync Framework Specification for the web detailing various capabilities that a server can implement to allow third-party systems to remain synchronized with its evolving resources. Feedback to this version of the specification is solicited and can be shared by March 15, 2013 on the ResourceSync Google Group. The ResourceSync joint project, funded with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and JISC, was initiated to develop a new open standard on the real-time synchronization of Web resources.

This ResourceSync draft specification introduces a range of easy to implement capabilities that a server may support in order to enable remote systems to remain more tightly in step with its evolving resources. It also describes how a server can advertise the capabilities it supports. Remote systems can inspect this information to determine how best to remain aligned with the evolving data. All capabilities are implemented on the basis of the document formats introduced by the Sitemap protocol. Capabilities can be combined to achieve varying levels of functionality and hence meet different local or community requirements.

The draft specification is available on the OAI website at: www.openarchives.org/rs/. Comments on the draft can be posted on the public discussion forum at: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/resourcesync. Group discussions are openly accessible; posting requires group membership.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has announced that it has been selected as one of ten host institutions for the inaugural National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) programme, launched by the Library of Congress and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The NDSR programme will enable ten recent graduates of master's degree programmes in relevant fields to complete a nine-month residency at various institutions in the Washington, DC, area.

Beginning in September 2013, accepted residents will attend an intensive two-week digital stewardship workshop at the Library of Congress. Thereafter, residents will begin their experience at a host institution to work on significant digital stewardship projects. Their projects will allow them to acquire hands-on knowledge and skills involving the collection, selection, management, long-term preservation, and accessibility of digital assets.

The resident selected to work with ARL will develop and promote policies and services to make digital assets of research libraries accessible. This person will strengthen and expand a new initiative on digital accessibility in research libraries by incorporating a universal design approach to library collections and services. A suite of solutions, organisational models, and best practices for the research library community will be compiled so that the research library community may collect, produce, curate, preserve, and make available their digital assets in a fully inclusive and accessible way.

The voting members of the US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved a new project to develop standardised bibliographic metadata and visual indicators to describe the accessibility of journal articles with respect to how 'open' they are.

It has been observed that many offerings are available from publishers under the banner of Open Access (OA), Increased Access, Public Access, or other names; the terms offered vary both between publishers and within publishers by journal, and in some cases, based on the funding organisation of the author. Adding to the potential confusion, a number of publishers also offer hybrid options in which some articles are 'open' while the rest of the journal's content are available only by subscription or licence.

It is said that no standardised bibliographic metadata currently provides information on whether a specific article is openly accessible and what re-use rights might be available to readers. Visual indicators or icons indicating the openness of an article are inconsistent in both design and use across publishers or even across journals from the same publisher.

The project launched by NISO will focus initially on metadata elements that describe the readership rights associated with an OA article. Specifically, the NISO Working Group will determine the optimal mechanisms to describe and transmit the rights, if any, an arbitrary user has to access a specific article from any internet connection point. Recommendations will include a means for distribution and aggregation of this metadata in machine-readable form. The group will also consider the feasibility of incorporating information on re-use rights and the feasibility of reaching agreement on transmission of that data.

This new project will be discussed in NISO's Open Teleconference call on February 11.

The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has announced that it has funded a project to make 6,500 newly digitised objects from University College London and the University of Reading's diverse museum collections openly accessible to students, teachers and the public at large. The objects include rare Ancient Egyptian artefacts brought to life in 21st century 3D, digital images of zoological specimens in glass jars, strange and beautiful anatomical prints, 16th century portraits and intriguing 19th century scientific gadgets. The digital artefacts encompass a range of disciplines from sciences to the arts.

In addition to the digitised objects, which can be freely viewed, downloaded and used on a Creative Commons licence, the two museums have also produced a range of Open Educational Resources (OER) such as videos and worksheets to support object-based learning. The interdisciplinary nature of these resources is said to make them particularly versatile for online learning and suitable for the growing number of initiatives such as Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

The digitised objects, which will add to a bank of 150,000 already existing digital resources from the two museums, are available through Culture Grid, the UK gateway to heritage resources. The OERs can be accessed through JORUM, the online educational resource sharing site, using the search term OBL4HE.

The libraries at Columbia University and Cornell University are taking a new step in their 2CUL partnership: integrating a major part of their operations.

The two libraries will integrate their technical services departments with the help of a three-year, $350,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These departments purchase and license library materials, such as books, e-books, e-journals and databases, and they provide data so that users can find and use those materials.

For library users, the 2CUL integration will mean better and faster access to more materials — including licensed journal articles, foreign materials and other content. When negotiating with vendors and other third parties for services and content, the technical services operation will exercise bargaining power on behalf of both research libraries.

The integration will also include seeking a common library management system that integrates data and workflows; and establishing collaborative collection building and coordinated processing. It will also include reviewing policies, practices, workflows and job responsibilities at each institution, with an eye toward reconciling them as much as possible. Drafting best practices and using guidelines; and adopting a new organisational structure and culture are also part of the integration plan.

Since both of these libraries serve high-level research institutions, their technical services work requires specialised language expertise (the 2CUL libraries collect materials in around 50 languages) as well as a range of unique content. The integration will give both libraries an enhanced pool of expertise and capacity, it is expected.

Additionally, some workflows will be similar enough to support work-sharing. The transformative 2CUL partnership began in 2009, with an initial grant from the Mellon Foundation that allowed Columbia and Cornell to join forces in addressing budgetary challenges posed by the economic recession and improve library efficiencies, promote innovation and meet new and emerging academic needs.

The new round of funding from the Mellon Foundation supports a critical piece of 2CUL's "Phase 2" period. Beyond the scope of the grant, the two libraries will pursue other goals for advancing the partnership, including more integrated collection building and mainstreaming 2CUL in other areas based on the success of the technical services integration.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has published a revised version of the 1973 joint Statement on Faculty Status of College and University Librarians. The statement - originally formulated by the AAUP, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), and the Association of American Colleges (now the Association of American Colleges and Universities) - calls for the granting of faculty status to librarians involved in teaching and research.

The new version of the statement adds language about the teaching and information-access roles of librarians and the role of librarians in university governance and outreach, and it reaffirms their need for academic freedom and tenure. Also added to the statement is a recommendation for salary adjustments for fiscal-year appointments.

The statement was revised by a joint subcommittee of the AAUP's Special Committee on the Status of Librarians in the Academy and the ACRL's Committee on the Status of Academic Librarians. Subcommittee members included Stephen Aby (University of Akron), Caroline Bordinaro (California State University–Dominguez Hills), Regina Koury (Idaho State University), Connie Strittmatter (Montana State University), and Deanna Wood (University of New Hampshire).

The revised statement was adopted as policy by the ACRL at its 2012 annual conference and by the AAUP's national Council in November 2012. It will be printed in the 2013 Bulletin of the AAUP.

The American Library Association (ALA) has announced that registration and housing for 2013 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, June 27-July 2, are now set to open on January 14 at 9:00 a.m. CST. It has asked that any communication received from its registration and housing systems, sent before the new date of January 14 was confirmed, be ignored.

New information and content are added to the ALA Annual Conference website. They can also be collected at #ala2013 (Twitter) and at bit.ly/ala2013fb (the Facebook Event page).

Key issues covered at the conference will include digital content and e-books, technology in libraries, innovation, books and authors, leadership, library advocacy, community engagement, and library marketing.

The ALA Annual Conference includes 500+ programmes, discussions and sessions on various topics, speakers and events, including best-selling author Khaled Hosseini, Congressman John Lewis, leadership expert Karol M. Wasylyshyn, and founder of wordnik.com Erin McKean, 800+ exhibitors highlighting new titles, products and services, and related fun events at exhibit hall stages and pavilions, and 100s of authors and preconferences offering in-depth professional development.

The other programmes includes key policy, research, and other updates from leading institutions and offices, in-depth, facilitated, and informal conversations on advancing library-led community engagement and practical steps, strategies, and tools, Library Unconference on Friday, Library Camp on Monday, and Networking Uncommons for impromptu sessions, follow-up conversations, and small get-togethers.

Also included are ALA JobLIST Placement Center connecting job seekers and employers, and offering free career counseling and celebrations of the 75th anniversary of the Caldecott Medal, with the participation of experts and children's book illustrators including Paul O. Zelinsky, Brian Selznick, Jerry Pinkney, Erin Stead, Chris Raschka, and Eric Rohmann.

Attendees needing to show how the conference would help their organisations may use the "Making your case to attend" resources, with guidelines for what information to present, what previous attendees have said about what they took home, and a sample budget worksheet.

The American Library Association (ALA) has announced the publication of Digital Humanities in Practice. The book is published by Facet Publishing and available through ALA Neal-Schuman. Digital humanities is projected as a vibrant and increasingly important global field, drawing together a broad spectrum of disciplines. The new publication is said to offer a cutting-edge and comprehensive introduction to the field.

Editors Claire Warwick, Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan gather expert guidance from leading academics and exciting international case studies to explore the possibilities and challenges that occur when culture and digital technologies intersect. Warwick, Terras and Nyhan are all members of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, University College London.

The key topics covered by the book include social media and crowd sourcing, 3D scanning and museums, user studies, open access (OS) and online teaching of digital humanities and books, texts and digital editing.

Founded in 1976 by Patricia Glass Schuman and John Vincent Neal, ALA Neal-Schuman, now an imprint of ALA Publishing, publishes professional books for librarians, archivists and knowledge managers.

The American Library Association (ALA) has extended its deadline to February 1 for a number of ALA awards and grants. The awards include the Beta Phi Mu award, Melvil Dewey Award, Paul Howard Award for Courage, Scholastic Library Publishing Award and the Sullivan Award for Public Library Administrators Supporting Services to Children. Although the online application has a December 1 deadline date, the applications will be accepted through February 15.

The Beta Phi Mu award is presented to a faculty member of a library school or an individual for distinguished service to education in librarianship. The award includes $1,000 and a 24k-gold-framed citation donated by Beta Phi Mu International Library Science Honorary Society.

The Melvil Dewey Medal honors an individual or group for a recent creative professional achievement in library management, training, cataloging and classification or the tools and techniques of librarianship. The award includes $2,000, the Dewey Medal and a 24k gold-framed citation, donated by OCLC/Forest Press, Inc.

The Paul Howard Award for Courage honours a librarian, library board, library group or individual for exhibiting unusual courage benefiting library programmes or services. The award, given every two years, includes $1,000 and a 24k gold-framed citation, donated by Paul Howard.

The Scholastic Library Publishing Award, an annual award consisting of $1,000 and a 24k gold-framed citation, is presented to a librarian whose 'unusual contribution to the stimulation and guidance of reading by children and young people' exemplifies outstanding achievement in the profession.

The Sullivan Award for Public Library Administrators Supporting Services to Children honours an individual who has shown exceptional understanding and support of library service to children while having general management/supervisory/ administrative responsibility that has included public library service to children in its scope. The recipient will receive a plaque and recognition artifact. The donor is Peggy Sullivan.

The American Library Association (ALA) is now accepting submissions for the John Cotton Dana Award (JCD). The award, which is managed by the Library Leadership and Management Association (LLAMA) division of ALA, honours outstanding library public relations. Eight $10,000 grants are awarded each year by the H.W. Wilson Foundation and the annual Awards Tea is sponsored by the ALA and EBSCO Publishing.

The award is named after John Cotton Dana, the father of the modern library, credited with helping transition libraries from reading rooms to community centers. JCD submissions include strategic library communication campaigns from all sizes and types of libraries. Submissions include re-branding efforts, promoting unique archives, awareness campaigns and community partnerships. Entries may be submitted by any library, Friends group, consulting agency or service provider, excluding libraries represented by the JCD Committee members.

JCD entries are organised around the areas such as needs assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation. Libraries submit samples of their processes, research, media releases, media coverage or other results received plus evaluation of the results and other documentation and supporting materials that show the scope and effectiveness of the library's strategic communication effort.

In recognition of their achievement, JCD award winners receive a cash development grant from the H.W. Wilson Foundation. The John Cotton Dana Awards are presented during an Awards Tea hosted by EBSCO Publishing held during the American Library Association annual conference. Entry documents are available at: http://www.ebscohost.com/jcd. All entries must be submitted by February 1, 2013.

Information services provider EBSCO, US, in co-sponsorship with the American Library Association (ALA) has awarded five librarians $1,500 scholarships to attend the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle from January 25–29, 2013. As part of the application process, librarians were asked to write an essay on the topic 'The conversation starts here: How would you lead the discussion in your library to bring about meaningful change to an existing process, service, or procedure?'

The winners outlined a fresh approach to connecting with both patrons and colleagues to drive change in his or her library. Nonetheless, all of the essays shared a common theme of making patrons' needs the central focus of the library's goals and decisions. Some strategies for achieving this objective, according to the winners, include implementing more customer-centric decisions in the library; using the power of social media to serve under-reached patron groups; and bringing together patrons and library staff to meet the challenges associated with access to exclusive content.

Applications were judged by an ALA-designated jury. The scholarship recipients will be honoured by EBSCO and ALA representatives during the conference at a breakfast on January 27, 2013.

The Elsevier Foundation has announced the 2012 grant recipients for the Innovative Libraries in Developing Countries and New Scholars award programmes. In total, $650,000 has been committed to eight institutions worldwide in addition to five ongoing multiyear grants and the Nurse Faculty programme. The Elsevier Foundation is funded by Elsevier, a global provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services.

The Innovative Libraries in Developing Countries programme awards grants to libraries for innovation in improving access and use of scientific, technical and medical information. The 2012 library grant recipients address real developing world issues through the use of STM information resources.

The New Scholars Program supports projects to help early- to mid-career women scientists balance family responsibilities with demanding academic careers and addresses the attrition rate of talented women scientists.

In 2012, the Elsevier Foundation's Nurse Faculty Program continued to support a multiyear grant to Sigma Theta Tau International Foundation for Nursing to develop an 18 month leadership academy and alleviate the nursing faculty shortage through retaining and transitioning new nurse educators to the faculty role.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has announced that Joyce Backus has been named NLM Associate Director for Library Operations and a member of the Senior Executive Service, effective December 16, 2012. The announcement was made by NLM Director Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg.

Backus began her NLM service in 1985, as a member of the 1985-1986 class of Associate Fellows. Since then, she has served in a number of key positions of increasing importance and responsibility, culminating most recently with her appointment as the Deputy Associate Director of Library Operations in June 2011.

Among many other achievements, Backus was a key player in the development of the Library's primary consumer health website, MedlinePlus. She also led the creation and implementation of MedlinePlus Connect, the free service that allows health organisations and health IT providers to link patient portals and electronic health record systems to MedlinePlus. In her past NLM positions, Backus has represented NLM and NIH in many contexts and in collaborations with other federal agencies, libraries and professional associations.

The American Library Association (ALA) has released the 'ALA E-book Media & Communications Toolkit,' a set of materials that will support librarians in taking action in their communities.

The toolkit was developed by the ALA's Digital Content and Libraries Working Group (DCWG). It includes op-ed and press release templates for library supporters interested in informing the public of the role that libraries play in building literate and knowledgeable communities. Additionally, the toolkit provides guidance on ways to use the media templates, as well as ALA talking points, e-book data, and public service announcement scripts.

The DCWG, a representative group made up of 27 ALA members from various types of libraries, advises the Association on issues related to libraries and digital content, and the provision of equitable access to digital content for all. The group has developed a number of other resources about e-books, including the report 'Ebook Business Models for Public Libraries,' a digital rights management 'Tip Sheet (PDF),' and an E-Content supplement to American Libraries magazine.

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) is accepting applications from prospective new presenters for the workshop 'Planning, Assessing, and Communicating Library Impact: Putting the Standards for Libraries in Higher Education into Action.' The day-long workshop is led by one or two expert presenters at locations across the country.

The workshop curriculum is designed to support librarians in applying the "Standards for Libraries in Higher Education" at their institutions. ACRL seeks to expand its pool of presenters by recruiting experienced individuals to join its existing team. Applications from individuals representing the full array of professional areas and services in academic and research librarianship are encouraged.

New presenters will gain experience by shadowing experienced presenters and team-teaching a section or assignment before taking a leading role. The workshop curriculum has been designed and presented in a variety of settings. There may be an occasional need to refresh the curriculum. New presenters would be expected to participate in these curriculum updates. Presenters may need to participate in planning calls and/or in-person meetings held in conjunction with the ALA Midwinter Meeting and/or Annual Conference.

Application materials are required to be submitted via email by 5 p.m. Central time on December 14, 2012, to Margot Conahan, ACRL manager of professional development, at mconahan@ala.org. Complete details, including qualifications, application information and more details on the workshops, are available on the ACRL Insider blog.

The American Library Association has named Caroline Kennedy as the 2013 Honorary Chair of National Library Week (April 14-20, 2013).

During National Library Week and throughout the month of April, libraries of all types - public, school, academic and special - hold special events to highlight the unique role libraries play in American society and encourage the public to use their resources. These resources include computers, books and e-books, homework help, assistance with resumes and job searches, accurate financial information, adult education courses, support for immigrants and more.

As Honorary Chair, Kennedy will appear in public service announcements (PSAs) promoting National Library Week. The PSAs, developed by the American Library Association's Campaign for America's Libraries, will be placed in magazines and online throughout the spring. ALA will also offer free customisation of the PSAs for libraries.

In addition, Kennedy is scheduled to speak at the 2013 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle at 10 a.m. on January 27.

The American Library Association's Campaign for America's Libraries is a public awareness campaign that promotes the value of libraries and librarians. Thousands of libraries of all types participate. The Campaign is made possible by ALA's Library Champions.

Library information provider OCLC Research, US, has announced that work is currently underway to transition the ArchiveGrid database of archival collection descriptions from a subscription service to a free service on a new interface developed and managed by the organisation.

A beta version of the new interface developed by OCLC Research is available at no charge at http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/. This beta has been designed to support OCLC's efforts to expand support for this type of data, engaging with the library/archive community to create more sustainable ways to grow the collection of data and represent it appropriately in WorldCat.

Beginning in November 2012, OCLC will no longer require authentication (by IP address or logon account) to use the stand-alone ArchiveGrid subscription service at http://archivegrid.org. This will provide easier access to and better syndication of ArchiveGrid and its collections to search engines like Google. By December 2012, the OCLC Research version of ArchiveGrid will transition from its current beta status to a production service. The OCLC Research version of ArchiveGrid will replace the http://archivegrid.org interface in January 2013.

It is believed that this new direction for ArchiveGrid marks a great opportunity to broaden contribution, participation, utility, and visibility of this unique and important collection of resources. A list of current contributors to the ArchiveGrid collection is available at http://beta.worldcat.org/archivegrid/.

Geek the Library, OCLC's community awareness campaign designed to highlight the value of public libraries, has received $1,924,883 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to extend participation in the programme to 1,000 additional libraries through June 2015. The funding allows increased emphasis on library staff planning and implementation of the program, and will help staff build on the knowledge and skills they need to be effective advocates for libraries in their communities.

A recent survey of public libraries implementing the Geek the Library campaign in local communities indicated a positive connection between the campaign and improved public perceptions of the library. The study also showed improvements in library staff advocacy- and marketing-related competencies. This final phase of the programme will build on these findings by introducing enhanced support for participating libraries, and a focus on building library staff confidence and skills with advocacy, marketing and communications.

Public libraries that implement the Geek the Library campaign will continue to receive free field support, a variety of printed materials and access to extensive online resources, including templates for localising campaign content easily. Posters that feature local community members have become a trademark of almost every campaign. The posters are an effective way to involve community members as they learn about the value of the library and the need for funding.

Geek the Library has a national campaign presence with its website, geekthelibrary.org, and social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. Geek the Library was developed based on results of OCLC's research published in From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America. The research and pilot campaign were also funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The programme will accept new participants through June 2014.

The US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the UKSG have announced that BioOne, JSTOR, LOCKSS, the Royal Society of Chemistry and SpringerLink are the most recent organisations to publicly endorse the Phase I recommendations of the KBART (Knowledge Bases And Related Tools) Working Group. The group is a joint NISO/UKSG initiative that is exploring data problems within the OpenURL supply chain. KBART's Phase I Recommended Practice, published in January 2010, contains practical recommendations for the timely exchange of accurate metadata between content providers and knowledge base developers.

All content providers, from major databases to small publishers, are encouraged to publicly endorse the KBART Recommended Practice by submitting a sample file to the KBART working group. Once the file's format and content has been reviewed and approved, and the provider has made it publicly available, the provider will be added to a public list of endorsing providers.

Knowledge base developers can endorse the KBART Recommended Practice by confirming that their systems can process KBART formatted files. In addition, a contacts registry is available on the KBART Information Hub at www.uksg.org/kbart or www.niso.org/workrooms/kbart where content providers and knowledge base developers can register their organisation's information for downloading holdings metadata.

The KBART working group is now progressing towards the end of Phase II and is focusing on enhancing the current recommendations with new guidelines for e-book, consortia and open access metadata.

The American Library Association (ALA) has announced that it will join the Library 2.012 Worldwide Virtual Conference again as a partner. During the event, projected as a global conversation on the current and future state of libraries and celebration of innovation, ALA staff and members will share expertise and content in several sessions on the programme. These would include e-book models for public libraries, what libraries can learn from e-reading data, restoring contemplation and models for collaboration.

The online Library 2.012 is a free conference held in multiple time zones over the course of three days, October 3-5. Subject strands include physical and virtual learning spaces, evolving professional roles in today's world, organising and creating information, changing delivery methods, user-centered access and mobile and geo-social information environments.

As part of "ALA Presents" sessions, Carrie Russell, director of the Program on Public Access to Information at ALA's Office for IT Policy, will present 'Ebook Business Models for Public Libraries' along with Bob Wolven. 'What Can Libraries Learn from New User (and Non-User!) E-Reading Data from the Pew Internet Project?' will be presented by Larra Clark, ALA program director and Kathryn Zickuhr, Pew Internet research analyst. 'Restoring Contemplation — Why We Should and How Libraries Can Help,' the ALA "Spotlight" session, will be presented by Jessie L. Mannisto in collaboration with the ALA Office for Information Technology Policy.

The other sessions include 'The Influence of E-Trends on Library Management' presented by Kathy Rosa, director of the ALA Office for Research and Statistics; 'Collaboration, Innovation, Education: A Model for Successful Financial Literacy Programming at the Library' presented by Aubrey B. Carroll, information service manager at Florence County

Library System recently instituted a financial literacy initiative. The initiative was funded through the Smart Investing@your library programme, a partnership between ALA and the FINRA Investor Education Foundation, and administered by RUSA (Reference and User Services Association, a division of ALA).

National Library of Medicine acting Associate Director for Library Operations (LO) Joyce Backus has announced the appointment of Loren Frant to serve as deputy chief of the Public Services Division (PSD) and Kenneth Koyle to serve as deputy chief of the History of Medicine Division (HMD). NLM claims to be the world's largest medical library and a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Frant came to NLM as an Associate Fellow in 2004. Following her Associate year, she accepted a position in PSD's Reference and Web Services Section as a systems librarian, where she led a team of librarians delivering Website redesigns and database improvements. She served as the technical lead for MedlinePlus and was then appointed head of the Health Information Products Unit (HIPU), a position she held until her selection as deputy chief.

As the head of the HIPU Unit, Frant led all MedlinePlus strategic decisions and directed the operations for a suite of important products and services, including MedlinePlus, MedlinePlus en español, MedlinePlus Web services, and she was key to the successful launch of MedlinePlus Connect in November 2010. She brings a combination of excellent technical, interpersonal, and management skills to the leadership of the Division.

Kenneth Koyle is a retired Army officer with more than 25 years of service. Since 2010, he has served as deputy chief of the US Army Medical Department's Center of History and Heritage (AMEDD) at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. In this capacity, he has been the executive officer of the Center and the sole active duty historian in the Army Medical Department, responsible with the chief of the Center for supervision of an 18-person staff of history, archives, and museum personnel and administration of a $2.1 million annual budget, as well as historical research in support of AMEDD and the Office of the Surgeon General.

Prior to his tenure at AMEDD, Koyle was a medical history fellow at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, where he received his master's degree in history.

The National Information Standards Organisation (NISO), US, has announced the publication of the COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile. The new Recommended Practice seeks to provide a practical implementation structure to be used in the creation of reports and services related to harvesting of COUNTER Release 4 reports using the NISO SUSHI Protocol.

The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting (SUSHI) Protocol was issued as a standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.93) in 2007 to simplify and automate the harvesting of COUNTER usage reports by libraries from the growing number of information providers they work with. COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) is an international initiative that published its first Code of Practice in 2003 and issued Release 4 of the COUNTER Code of Practice for e-Resources in April 2012.

XML schemas supporting the Implementation Profile and Release 4 of the Counter Code of Practice have also been published by NISO, which has an agreement with COUNTER to maintain the schemas and keep the SUSHI and COUNTER schemas in synch.

The COUNTER-SUSHI Implementation Profile (NISO RP-14-2012), the referenced schemas, and additional implementation guidance for SUSHI can be found on the SUSHI webpages at: www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi/.

The US' Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has announced that the Public Library Association (PLA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), has been awarded a $291,178 grant through the Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program. PLA will partner with the ALA's Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) and the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) to develop an online collection of digital literacy resources that will be accessible to libraries, patrons and other community-based organisations.

In addition to user-directed resources, the grant activities will include the development of training curricula in English and Spanish, technology trainer competencies, handouts and patron skills assessment. PLA has also decided to launch the online beta resource centre at the 2013 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, with plans to continue demonstrations of the resource centre at ALA and PLA conferences throughout 2013 and 2014.

Key steps throughout the two-year grant period will include gathering and evaluating existing state and public library resources related to digital literacy, promoting these resources to increase library awareness, developing and implementing instructional resources, identifying gaps in resources as well as solutions for remediating the gaps and assessing and possibly developing materials for special populations.

PLA aims to ensure the sustainability of the resource centre by continuing to vet and add high-quality digital literacy tools to the collection based on practitioner feedback, including materials for the Latino and Spanish-speaking communities with the help of REFORMA, establishing a community of practice, and determining viable partnerships for continued training and evolution of the centre.

The US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the publication of a special themed issue of the Information Standards Quarterly (ISQ) magazine on Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums. ISQ Guest Content Editor Corey Harper, Metadata Services Librarian, New York University, has sought to pull together a broad range of perspectives on what is happening today with linked data in cultural institutions.

A feature article by Gordon Dunsire, Corey Harper, Diane Hillmann and Jon Phipps on Linked Data Vocabulary Management describes the shift in popular approaches to large-scale metadata management and interoperability to the increasing use of the Resource Description Framework to link bibliographic data into the larger web community. The authors also identify areas where best practices and standards are needed to ensure a common and effective linked data vocabulary infrastructure.

Four "in practice" articles seek to illustrate the growth in the implementation of linked data in the cultural sector. Jane Stevenson, in "Linking Lives", describes the work to enable structured and linked data from the Archives Hub in the UK. In "Joining the Linked Data Cloud in a Cost-Effective Manner", Seth van Hooland, Ruben Verborgh and Rik Van de Walle show how general purpose Interactive Data Transformation tools, such as Google Refine, can be used to efficiently perform the necessary task of data cleaning and reconciliation that precedes the opening up of linked data.

Ted Fons, Jeff Penka and Richard Wallis discuss OCLC's Linked Data Initiative and the use of Schema.org in WorldCat to make library data relevant on the web. In "Europeana: Moving to Linked Open Data", Antoine Isaac, Robina Clayphan and Bernhard Haslhofer explain how the metadata for over 23 million objects are being converted to an RDF-based linked data model in the EU's flagship digital cultural heritage initiative.

Jon Voss provides a status on "Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives, and Museums State of Affairs" and the annual summit to advance this work. Thomas Elliott, Sebastian Heath and John Muccigrosso report on the Linked Ancient World Data Institute, a workshop to further the availability of linked open data to create reusable digital resources with the classical studies disciplines.

Kevin Ford wraps up the contributed articles with a standard spotlight article on LC's Bibliographic Framework Initiative and the Attractiveness of Linked Data. This Library of Congress-led community effort aims to transition from MARC 21 to a linked data model.

Library information provider OCLC Research, US, and the Open Planets Foundation (OPF) are conducting a Preservation Health Check pilot to analyse the quality of preservation metadata created and in use by operational repository and deposit systems and evaluate the potential of such metadata for assessing digital preservation risks.

As part of this pilot, the organisations are holding a Preservation Health Workshop at the PREMIS Implementation Fair (iPRES2012) at the University of Toronto on October 2, 2012. This workshop will explore the use of real life preservation metadata for risk assessment, introduce and discuss the concept behind the preservation health check pilot and propose an approach for mapping preservation metadata schemas with preservation risk assessment frameworks and walk through a number of examples.

Digital preservation practitioners and researchers/experts are invited to come to the workshop with real life examples of preservation metadata. It is expected that this exercise will help build a better shared understanding of the why, what and how preservation metadata are collected and created.

Library information provider OCLC Research, US, has announced that the company's Consulting Project Manager Eric Childress has accepted an invitation to join the NISO Content and Collection Management Committee. NISO (National Information Standards Organization) identifies, develops, maintains, and publishes technical standards related to managing information in the digital environment. The committee is one of three main leadership groups that help oversee existing and new standards work for NISO.

Each Topic Committee works with the community it serves to develop and maintain the plans necessary to sustain an active standards programme for its area. As part of this work, they review and approve new work items, provide oversight to working groups, review and approve final publications, provide reviews of standards that are due for their five-year reaffirmation and provide recommendations on these, and more.

The Content and Collections Management Topic Committee focuses on issues regarding developing, describing, providing access to, and maintaining content items and collections. Current working groups under its oversight include Digital Bookmarking and Annotation Sharing, Standardised Markup for Journal Articles, the joint NISO/NFAIS Working Group on Supplemental Journal Materials and other maintenance agencies concerned with Dublin Core and the "classic Z39" family of NISO standards.

The committee meets monthly via teleconference and, when possible, annually in person. Committee terms are for three years.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO), US, has announced the publication of the two-part American National Standard on the NISO Circulation Interchange Protocol (NCIP), ANSI/NISO Z39.83. NCIP addresses the need for interoperability among disparate circulation, interlibrary loan, consortial borrowing and self-service applications by standardising the exchange of messages between and among computer-based applications.

Part 1 of the standard defines the Protocol and Part 2: Implementation Profile provides a practical implementation structure. The NCIP protocol is said to be widely supported in integrated library systems (ILS) and resource sharing software.

Mike Dicus, Product Manager at Ex Libris Group and Co-chair of the NCIP Standing Committee, said the latest edition of NCIP, version 2.02, incorporated implementers' feedback and experience into the standard with changes that improved the usefulness and practicality of the various services. One of the larger changes in 2.02 is the addition of a Lookup Item Set service. This service allows an initiator to query with a single request a set of items that may share some kind of relationship, such as multiple volumes of a book set. Additionally, Bibliographic Record Id has been made repeatable within Bibliographic Description.

Rob Walsh, representative for EnvisionWare and the Maintenance Agency for NCIP, said that in addition to the standard, the NCIP Standing Committee had made available supporting tools and documentation to aid in implementation. An XML schema is available that matches the implementation profile defined in Part 2 of the standard. The document 'Introduction to NCIP' provides librarians and other implementers with a basic introduction to NCIP and links to sources of additional information about the standard.

The NCIP Core Message Set is also stated to define a minimal set of nine messages that supports the majority of the current functionality for resource sharing and self-service applications and provides a simpler starting point for new implementers. An NCIP Implementer Registry collects information about vendors' implementations-specifically which versions and which messages are supported.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO), US, has announced the publication of a new American National Standard, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite, ANSI/NISO Z39.96-2012. JATS provides a common XML format in which publishers and archives can exchange journal content by preserving the intellectual content of journals independent of the form in which that content was originally delivered.

In addition to the element and attribute descriptions, three journal article tag sets are part of the standard. While designed to describe the textual and graphical content of journal articles, it can also be used for some other materials, such as letters, editorials and book and product reviews.

The JATS standard is available as both an online XML document and a freely downloadable PDF from the NISO website. Supporting documentation and schemas in DTD, RELAX NG, and W3C Schema formats are available at: jats.nlm.nih.gov/.

OCLC, a US-based non-profit, membership, computer library service and research organisation, and Europeana are collaborating to investigate ways of creating semantic links between the millions of digital objects that are accessible online through Europeana.eu in order to improve 'similar object' browsing.

Europeana is Europe's digital library, archive and museum. The Europeana platform and network of experts facilitate research and knowledge exchange between librarians, curators and archivists, and link them with digital innovators and the creative industries. Europeana currently gives people access to over 24 million books, paintings, films, recordings, photographs and archival records from 2,200 partner organisations, through an interface in 29 languages.

Because aggregating metadata from these heterogeneous collections leads to quality issues such as duplication, uneven granularity of the object descriptions, ambiguity between original and derivative versions of the same object, etc., Europeana and OCLC Research are working together on innovation pilots to identify and create semantic links between objects that are connected.

OCLC Research has extensive experience and expertise in metadata quality improvement techniques and methods, such as duplicate detection and clustering of similar metadata records around FRBR-entity-relationships, reproductions and originals, different cataloging languages. In addition, OCLC Research is currently experimenting with the automated enhancement of records with links to the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) and other Linked Data elements. The data quality improvement and enrichment efforts of OCLC are part of its philosophy to 'make the metadata work harder for libraries' and to enhance end-user experience.

The collaboration between Europeana and OCLC Research will benefit both organizations and their partners, offering new opportunities for data enrichment. The outcomes of the research project will feed into the implementation of the Europeana Data Model (EDM), which is devised to improve the browsing experience of the visitors of Europeana.eu. In addition, the piloting of our data clustering and enrichment methods and techniques will inform follow-up activities in more innovative directions and opportunities to develop new data services for third parties.

The team members working on the research project are all based in the Netherlands. Europeana team members include Antoine Isaac, Scientific Coordinator; Valentine Charles, Ingestion Specialist; and Nuno Freire, Interoperability Architect at The European Library. OCLC Research team members include Titia van der Werf, Senior Program Officer; Shenghui Wang, Research Scientist; and Rob Koopman, Innovation Lab Architect.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has announced its first initiative as part of its recently-established partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which lays groundwork for the two institutions to cooperate on initiatives of common interest. NLM, a component of the National Institutes of Health, claims to be the world's largest biomedical library.

Working in cooperation with the NEH's Office of Digital Humanities, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland and Research Councils UK, the NLM will be a part of 'Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities,' an interdisciplinary symposium exploring the intersection of digital humanities and biomedicine.

Scheduled for April 10-12, 2013, Shared Horizons will be a unique forum through which participants and their institutions will be able to address questions about collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical-driven humanities scholarship.

Shared Horizons will create opportunities for disciplinary cross-fertilization through a mix of formal and informal presentations combined with breakout sessions, all designed to promote a rich exchange of ideas about how large-scale quantitative methods can lead to new understandings of human culture. Bringing together researchers from the digital humanities and bioinformatics communities, the symposium will explore ways in which these two communities might fruitfully collaborate on projects that bridge the humanities and medicine around the topics of sequence alignment and network analysis, two modes of analysis that intersect with 'big data.'

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the final version of Research Library Issues (RLI) no. 279, which is devoted to legal concerns and evolving professional practices around digitising special collections and archival materials. A pre-publication version of this issue was released in June. The final version of issue 279 uses the streamlined layout that debuted with issue 278.

This issue of RLI provides an overview of the legal and contractual issues involved in digitising special collections and archives. The issue also includes a model digitisation contract for use with outside vendors, as well as model 'deeds of gift' that can secure permission from rights holders to make donated material accessible on the web.

Additionally, the issue presents a critical essay by Kevin L. Smith, Director of Scholarly Communications at Duke University, on a new way of thinking about copyright and risk management in digitising special collections.

Research Library Issues no. 279 (June 2012) is freely available from ARL Digital Publications.

OCLC, a US-based nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organisation, has been awarded a $99,957 grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for a new initiative, ‘The Big Shift: Advancing Public Library Participation in Our Digital Future.’ The purpose of the grant is to more fully understand the challenges that US public libraries face in providing e-book content to borrowers, as they ensure that all Americans continue to have access to commercially produced content through their local public libraries, even as formats change.

OCLC will partner with the American Library Association (ALA) and the Public Library Association (PLA) to review the e-book landscape and jointly develop recommendations for managing the e-book environment, in order to ensure adequate public access to these emerging resources.

Research indicates that libraries are at a tipping point in e-content investment, as the percentage of e-book and e-journal collection expenditures continues to steadily outgrow print books and journals each year - and is likely to increase exponentially with the rapid growth in e-book adoption.

This award builds on an IMLS-supported public library discussion hosted by Martin Gómez at the Los Angeles Public Library in November 2011. Grant activities will include investigating the nature and extent of challenges public libraries are facing in this area, and identifying possible solutions; a convening of public library leaders and others to set specific strategies to ensure public access to digital content; and reporting on strategies that all public libraries can use to advance their own work in local communities.

Gómez (University of Southern California), Patrick Losinski (Columbus Metropolitan Library), Brian Bannon (Chicago Public Library), and Vailey Oehlke (Multnomah County Library) will provide guidance on the program's activities, which will be closely coordinated with the ALA's Digital Content & Libraries Working Group, co-chaired by Sari Feldman (Cuyahoga County Public Library) and Robert Wolven (Columbia University).

Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, and the creators of the readers’ advisory service, NoveList have announced the launch of LibraryAware, a new online marketing programme designed to meet the growing needs of libraries to create, deliver and measure promotional messages that extend outreach into communities and bring patrons into libraries.

LibraryAware equips librarians with expert tools to reach out to patrons and help them discover the programmes, products and services libraries have to offer. Librarians can combine professionally-designed templates with their own pieces of ‘reusable content’ to carry information across an entire suite of promotional materials that can then easily be delivered to customers, community partners, elected officials and the media.

LibraryAware improves upon what libraries are already doing by providing continually-updated designs and best practice recommendations as well as a way to integrate messaging easily into popular event software and social media.

With the inclusion of hundreds of images and photographs from Getty Images, creators and distributors of still imagery, video and multimedia products, LibraryAware offers access to professional-grade art that library staff can use alongside their own locally-held collection of images. More than clip art, these images are hand-selected by the LibraryAware team of marketing professionals to address the particular communications and publicity requirements of libraries. As part of its commitment to libraries’ success, LibraryAware will continually add to the image collection based on subscriber feedback.

LibraryAware is available as a subscription service to libraries. Uses for the LibraryAware programme include a full range of marketing and communication channels including email blasts, e-newsletters, flyers, bookmarks, brochures, website inserts, letters, invitations, and social media.

The History of Medicine Division of the US’ National Library of Medicine recently added to its online oral history content 130 interviews, over 6,800 pages of transcripts and 50 hours of audio content, along with five new special collections. These additions more than double the number of interviews, and increases by 50 percent the number of pages of transcripts available.

The content may be accessed at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/manuscripts/oh.html, as part of the growing electronic texts of the Library's Archives and Modern Manuscripts Program.

As with the initial release, the materials include digital editions of transcripts, and audio content when feasible. Users can browse the interviews by title, interviewee name and subject. Full-text searching is available across all collections, across each collection and within each transcript.

The five new collections include the Albert Szent-Györgyi Oral History Collection, the James W. Papez Oral History Collection, the NIMH Oral History Collection, National Information Center on Health Services Research Oral Histories, and the Stephen Strickland NIH Extramural Program Oral History Collection.

Transcripts are marked up following the Text Encoding Initiative's (TEI) XML encoding level 1 parameters. Audio content is delivered via a custom Flash player and is downloadable as an MP3. Archival WAV files are available upon request.

Negotiators from nine countries are meeting on July 2-10 in San Diego to discuss the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA). The TPPA is a multilateral trade agreement between Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Vietnam, Malaysia, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Peru and Singapore, covering all aspects of commercial relations between the countries.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), along with organisations representing the library community in some of the countries participating in the TPPA, have expressed concern that the TPPA's extensive intellectual property chapter does not reflect the balance necessary to protect the public domain and the ways in which society may access and use content. Presently, exceptions to copyright protection are said to be noticeably absent from leaked drafts of this ‘gold standard' IP agreement for the 21st century.

As with the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which has been rejected by the European Parliament, library groups have reportedly been concerned throughout the TPPA negotiations, regarding the lack of transparency related to its procedures, provisions and priorities.

IFLA, alongside nine other library organisations, has issued a statement on the TPPA which outlines its concerns. The statement also reiterates the role libraries play in fostering equitable access to information and cultural expression, while ensuring that the interests of creators are respected and protected.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has joined the American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), who work collectively as the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA), to file an amicus curiae brief (PDF) with the Supreme Court of the United States in support of petitioner Supap Kirtsaeng in the case Kirtsaeng v. Wiley & Sons. The LCA asks the Court to be true to the values of the country’s founders - people like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, who were both founders of libraries and great champions of library lending.

Wiley, a publisher of textbooks and other materials, claims Kirtsaeng infringed its copyrights by re-selling in the US cheaper foreign editions of Wiley textbooks that his family lawfully purchased abroad. The LCA believes an adverse decision in this case could affect libraries’ right to lend books and other materials manufactured abroad.

The ‘first-sale doctrine’ is the provision in the Copyright Act that allows any purchaser of a legal copy of a book or other copyrighted work to sell or lend that copy. However, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the first-sale doctrine applied only to copies manufactured in the US. This interpretation of the law effectively strips libraries of their first-sale right to lend their own copies of works made abroad.

In its friend-of-the-court brief, the LCA has asked the Supreme Court to reverse the Second Circuit and apply the first-sale doctrine to all copies manufactured with the lawful authorisation of the holder of a work’s US copyright.

This is the second case the Supreme Court has heard on this issue in the last two years. In Costco v. Omega, a case involving the importation of luxury watches with copyrighted logos on them, the Court was deadlocked 4-4, leaving the issue unresolved. Justice Kagan pulled-out herself from the case due to her participation in the litigation when she was Solicitor General, but Justice Kagan will participate in Kirtsaeng.

The LCA brief explains that this case is critically important to libraries and their users because a significant portion of US library collections consist of resources that were manufactured overseas. More than 200 million books in US libraries have foreign publishers. Additionally, many books published by US publishers were actually printed in other countries, and often these books do not indicate where they were printed. If a book does not specify that it was printed in the US, a library would not know whether it could lend it without being exposed to a copyright lawsuit.

The LCA believes it is critically important for the court to recognise the impact this case could have on library services to the public and consider possible solutions.

The Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) consists of three major library associations—the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of College and Research Libraries. These three associations collectively represent over 300,000 information professionals and thousands of libraries of all kinds throughout the US and Canada.

The American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference was held from June 21-26 in California. The event saw a unanimous resolution in support of the value of school libraries passed by ALA Council, as well as discussions about e-books, privacy, library advocacy and other issues.

A report titled ‘Libraries, Patrons, and E-books’ from the Pew Internet and American life project was released in the conference. Following the release, Penguin announced that it would re-start e-book sales to libraries. Two New York City public library systems are set to get Penguin e-books as part of a one-year pilot programme.

Pew's Lee Rainie discussed the survey findings in a session entitled ‘The Rise of E-reading,’ and then on a panel on ‘Access to Digital Content: Diverse Approaches.’

The ALA’s Washington Office, in its update, introduced a new advocacy tool called Mobile Commons, and paired it with presentations from speakers representing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the OpenGovernment.org.

ALA also announced the first recipients of the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, funded by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York and sponsored by RUSA and Booklist. The conference also acknowledged the key role played by school libraries, as the School Library Task Force introduced a resolution to the ALA Council that stated that school libraries and librarians were critical to educational success.

Rebecca MacKinnon, author of Consent of the Networked, who works on global Internet policy as a Schwartz Senior Fellow, was the keynote speaker at the Opening General Session on Friday.

The membership of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has elected new leadership for the 2012-2013 term that begins on July 1, 2012. Barbara Preece, Dean of the Library California State University, San Marcos, who previously served as Vice Chair, will now become Chair of NISO for the 2012-13 term.

Heather Reid has been elected to serve as Vice Chair of the NISO Board of Directors and will transition into the chairmanship in the 2013-14 term. Reid is Director of Data Systems at the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) and currently serves as a member of NISO's Board of Directors. She has more than 25 years experience in libraries and publishing including past positions at the Harvard University Library and EBSCO Publishing.

In her current position, Reid leads the team responsible for maintaining CCC's extensive database of bibliographic and rights data. She also sits on the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) Rights Committee, which is engaged in the development of a standard format for the expression of rights information, and BISG's Content Structure Committee, which develops best practices for representing book content for print and digital output.

Other industry leaders also elected to seats on the NISO Board of Directors include Janice L. Fleming, Director of Business and Planning for PsycINFO, American Psychological Association; Mairead Martin, Senior Director of Digital Library Technologies, Pennsylvania State University; Patricia A. Steele, Dean, University of Maryland Libraries; Tyler Walters, Dean, University Libraries, Virginia Tech; and Keith Webster, VP and Director, Academic Relations and Strategy, John Wiley and Sons

Bruce Heterick, Vice President, Outreach & Participation Services, JSTOR and Portico, who is currently serving as NISO's Chair, will serve the next term in the role as Past Chair. Bruce Rosenblum, CEO of Inera Incorporated, will continue to serve as NISO's Treasurer, a position he has held since 2011. Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director also serves Ex Officio on the Board as Secretary.

The voting members of the US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved a new project to develop recommended practices for the Demand-Driven Acquisition (DDA) of Monographs. Many libraries have embraced DDA (also referred to as patron-driven acquisition) to present many more titles to their patrons for potential use and purchase than would ever be feasible under the traditional purchase model. If implemented correctly, DDA is seen to make it possible to purchase only what is needed, allowing libraries to spend the same amount of money as they previously spent on monographs, but with a higher rate of use.

However, this model requires libraries to develop and implement new procedures for adding titles to a "consideration pool", for keeping unowned titles available for purchase for some future period, often years after publication, for providing discovery methods of titles in the pool, establishing rules on when a title gets purchased or only temporarily leased, and how potential titles are discovered, and for handling of multiple formats of a title.

Individuals interested in participating in this working group should contact Nettie Lagace, Associate Director for Programs (nlagace@niso.org). An interest group list for this project will be available for those who would like to receive updates on the Working Group's progress and provide feedback to the group on its work.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has announced a $250,000 award to WebJunction to work with state libraries in Illinois, Mississippi, and West Virginia; federal policy makers; and the national nonprofit Connect2Compete to help national digital literacy efforts effectively work with libraries to plan for and deliver digital literacy training. The grant will identify model approaches for partnerships with libraries to meet public demand for training.

During the past year, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced major commitments from the private sector, foundations, and individuals to work with Connect2Compete, a national non-profit organisation with an ambitious goal to ‘harness digital opportunity for all Americans.’

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Through grant making, policy development, and research, the institute helps communities and individuals thrive through broad public access to knowledge, cultural heritage, and lifelong learning.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) issued the first public appraisal of the Digging into Data Challenge, an international grant programme first funded by JISC, the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the US National Science Foundation and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

These findings are presented in a report, “One Culture. Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences�. It was made public at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries JCDL 2012 conference in Washington, DC. The findings come along with a series of recommendations for researchers, administrators, scholarly societies, academic publishers, research libraries and funding agencies. The report is available online in pdf format; an extended version with case studies is also available in html format. Print copies are available for ordering through the website.

The Digging into Data Challenge was launched in 2009 to better understand how ‘big data’ changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Scholars in these disciplines now use massive databases of materials that range from digitised books, newspapers and music to transactional data such as web searches, sensor data, or cell phone records. The Challenge seeks to discover what new, computationally based research methods might be applied to these sources.

In its first year, the Digging into Data Challenge made awards to eight teams of scholars, librarians and computer and information scientists. Over the following two years, report authors Christa Williford and Charles Henry conducted site visits, interviews and focus groups to understand how these complex international projects were being managed, what challenges they faced, and what project teams were learning from the experience.

In 2011, four additional funding bodies joined the four original cooperating agencies in support of 14 new international collaborative research projects. These funders include the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US); the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK); the Economic and Social Research Council (UK); and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

CLIR is an independent, non-profit organisation that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions and communities of higher learning.

The voting members of US-based National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have approved a new project to formalise the 3M Standard Interchange Protocol (SIP) as an American National Standard. Introduced in 1993, the SIP protocol provides a mechanism for Integrated Library Systems (ILS) applications and self-service devices to communicate seamlessly to perform self-service transactions. This protocol reportedly became a de facto standard around the world, and remains the primary protocol to integrate ILS and self-service devices.

Since the protocol's inception, 3M has continued to produce updated versions of it – the most recent being version 3.0 in late 2011. A NISO Working Group will now shepherd SIP 3.0 through the standardisation process of becoming an American National Standard.

Anyone interested in participating in the working group to review SIP 3.0 and prepare it for balloting as a NISO standard may contact NISO at nisohq@niso.org.

Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has awarded two public libraries with one-year subscriptions to LibraryAware, an online programme designed to maximise libraries’ promotional resources, helping them to integrate outreach with customisable, scalable tools and resources. The winners were chosen by drawing at a LibraryAware launch party attended by more than 300 people during the Public Library Association Conference in Philadelphia.

Speakers at the event included Vice President of NoveList, Duncan Smith, who set the tone for the evening with a talk praising LibraryAware communities and their ability to create a culture of learning and exploration that enriches the lives of their residents. LibraryAware Project Lead, Nancy Dowd, discussed how this powerful tool will transform libraries’ promotional efforts. Vice President and Group Publisher of Library Journal, Ian Singer, announced Library Journal’s latest award, the LibraryAware Community Award.

The winners were Nicole Frilling, Digital Branch Librarian at Kenton County Public Library in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky and Derek Wolfgram, Deputy County Librarian at Santa Clara County Library in Los Gatos, California.

LibraryAware meets the growing needs of libraries to create, deliver and measure promotional messages that extend outreach into communities, bringing patrons into libraries. The online product offers consistent branding and professional designs, best practices and recommendations and can be integrated into popular event software and social media.

Public Relations & Development Director at Kenton County Public Library, Robin Klaene, outlined her library’s plan to use LibraryAware as part of the process of evaluating and redesigning flyers and other items.

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has released a white paper, 'Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate: A Report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summits,' which reports on two invitational summits supported by a National Leadership Collaborative Planning Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The white paper is freely available from the ACRL Value of Academic Libraries website. The ACRL Value of Academic Libraries initiative is a multiyear project designed to assist academic librarians in demonstrating library value.

As part of the Value of Academic Libraries initiative, ACRL joined with three partners – the Association for Institutional Research, Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and the Council of Independent Colleges – to sponsor two national summits held November 29 - December 1, 2011. The summits were initiated in response to the 2010 ACRL publication The Value of Academic Libraries: A Comprehensive Research Review and Report. As one of its recommendations, the report called on the association to create a professional development program to build librarians’ capacity to document, demonstrate, and communicate library value in advancing the mission and goals of their colleges and universities.

The summits convened senior librarians, chief academic administrators and institutional researchers from 22 postsecondary institutions for discussions about library impact. Fifteen representatives from higher education organisations, associations and accreditation bodies also participated in the summit discussions and presentations and facilitated small group work.

The report - co-authored by Karen Brown, associate professor at Dominican University, and ACRL Senior Strategist for Special Initiatives Kara Malenfant - summarises broad themes about the dynamic nature of higher education assessment that emerged from the summits. The report presents five recommendations for the library profession. It discusses these recommendations and articulates a framework for future action. It serves as a resource for academic librarians along with library and higher education groups involved with helping institutions to assess and advance their missions.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the publication of a new edition of the recommended practice SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding (NISO RP-7-2012).

The SERU Recommended Practice offers a mechanism that can be used as an alternative to a license agreement by expressing commonly shared understandings between content providers and libraries. These understandings include such things as the definition of authorised users, expectations for privacy and confidentiality, and online performance and service provisions. The 2012 updated version of SERU recognises both the importance of making SERU more flexible for those who want to expand its use beyond e-journals, while acknowledging the fact that consensus for other types of e-resource transactions are not as well-established as they are for e-journals.

According to Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director, widespread adoption of the SERU model for electronic resource transactions offers substantial benefits to both publishers and libraries by removing the overhead of license negotiation. The SERU Registry of those interested in using the SERU approach already contains over 70 publishers and content providers and185 libraries and consortia. The expansion of the recommendations to address additional types of e-resources should interest more organisations in joining the SERU registry.

Executives from ProQuest were present as Queen Elizabeth II officially launched an online view into royal history: a digital retrospective of the complete personal journals of Queen Victoria, enabling the first-ever access to the private records of one of the world's most influential public figures. With its expertise in making rare, fragile works accessible to broad audiences, ProQuest is a partner in the project along with University of Oxford's renowned Bodleian Libraries and the Royal Archives.

According to ProQuest, its 'sophisticated digitisation and search technologies have been combined with the content and subject expertise of the Bodleian Libraries and the Royal Archives. In eight months, the organisations have enabled 43,000 pages of Queen Victoria's thoughts and experiences to be explored in an image-rich and easy-to-use website – www.queenvictoriasjournals.org. The launch date marks the birthday of Queen Victoria and coincides with a 60-year reign of HM Queen Elizabeth II - a ‘Diamond Jubilee’ year milestone that is shared by both monarchs.

Queen Victoria's journals have never been published in their entirety before and were only accessible by appointment at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. Global public access to the website is available through June 30. After this a specialised version for libraries will become available from ProQuest, enabling access for scholars, researchers and the general public around the world.

Online access to Queen Victoria's Journals includes features for easy browsing and reading. Pages from the journals can be searched by date or place of writing, and transcriptions of each page–searchable by keyword are currently provided for the period up to 1840, with further releases planned throughout the year. An interactive timeline and drawings by Queen Victoria, along with essays about aspects of her life, authored by Sir Roy Strong, Laurence Goldman and Peter Ward-Jones among others, add further perspective.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has released the draft Recommended Practice ‘PIE-J: Presentation & Identification of E-Journals’ (NISO RP-16-201x) for public review and comment through July 5, 2012. The PIE-J draft Recommended Practice and an online commenting form are available from the NISO PIE-J workroom at http://www.niso.org/workrooms/piej/.

The National Library of Medicine, a component of the National Institutes of Health, has a deep interest in the publishing models used by scientific journals, from the viewpoints of practical and efficient use of titles that are indexed for MEDLINE, and the clear and accurate preservation of the scientific literature for use by future generations. This notice presents an opportunity for others with a similar interest to participate in the development of a Recommended Practice that will provide guidance on the presentation and identification of electronic journals, an undertaking of the National Information Standards Organization.

This Recommended Practice was developed to provide guidance on the presentation of e-journals - particularly in the areas of title presentation, accurate use of ISSN, and citation practices - to publishers and platform providers, as well as to solve some long-standing concerns of serials librarians. In addition to the recommendations, the document includes extensive examples of good practices using screenshots from various publishers' online journals platforms; a discussion of helpful resources for obtaining title history and ISSN information; an overview of the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) and key points for using it correctly; an explanation of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), the registration agency CrossRef, and tips on using DOIs for journal title management; and a review of related standards and recommended practices.

Citations form the basis for much scholarly research. Connecting researchers with appropriate content is the goal of OpenURL linking and other reference linking systems. Unless journal websites accurately and uniformly list all the titles under which content was published, user access to desired content is considerably diminished. The PIE-J project was initiated to address these issues. The PIE-J Recommended Practice provides a clear and succinct list of guidelines that publishers can easily implement to facilitate long-term access to their e-journal content. This constructive advice will aid publishers with the presentation of born-digital content as well as supporting the continued digitisation of content from journals originally published only in print.

Library information provider OCLC Research, US, has announced that Max Klein has been appointed as the Wikipedian in Residence, a three-month position at the company's San Mateo, California office until the end of August 2012.

A Wikipedian in Residence, as defined by Wikipedia, is a Wikipedia editor who accepts a placement with an institution to facilitate Wikipedia entries related to that institution. These positions are associated with Wikipedia's GLAM WikiProject (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) initiative, which focuses on improving Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to the cultural sector.

As the Wikipedian in Residence, Max Klein will work with OCLC Research as community coordinator to explore and pursue mutually beneficial projects between OCLC, library stakeholders, and the Wikipedia community through a range of activities, including working with OCLC staff and libraries to help foster a broader understanding of Wikipedia's practices. He will initially focus on two goals - working with OCLC staff and libraries to help foster a broader understanding of Wikipedia's practices, and launching an inquiry into what technological integration is possible both technically and politically.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), a component of the National Institutes of Health, is among the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) member libraries participating in a project to digitise an estimated 6,000 volumes from 200 historical American medical journal titles published between 1797 and 1923.

Funding for the digitisation of these journals from the collections of Columbia, Harvard and Yale Universities and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia is made available through a two-year grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to Open Knowledge Commons (OKC).

NLM and other MHL collaborators not directly involved in the digitisation will assist the effort by providing journal volumes that the four participants do not hold. The digitised journals will join the more than 33,000 monographs, serials, pamphlets, and films currently available in the MHL. The digitised journals will be made freely available to researchers through the Medical Heritage Library collection in the Internet Archive.

The MHL is a content centered digital community supporting research, education, and dialogue that enables the history of medicine to contribute to a deeper understanding of human health and society. It serves as the point of access to a valuable body of quality curated digital materials and to the broader digital and nondigital holdings of its members.

The US’ Salzburg Global Seminar and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) have announced the publication of a report titled ‘Libraries and Museums in an Era of Participatory Culture.’ The report details the events of the October 2011 convening of 58 library, museum and cultural heritage leaders from 31 countries. Together, the participants developed a set of recommendations to help libraries and museums embrace new possibilities for public engagement that are made possible by societal and technological change.

The deliberations identified ‘imperatives for the future’ including accepting the notion of democratic access, placing a major emphasis on public value and impact, and embracing lifelong learning.

Building on the IMLS initiative, “The Future of Museums and Libraries�, as well as on past museum and library sessions convened by the Salzburg Global Seminar, this session brought together library and museum leaders, cultural and educational policymakers, cultural sector researchers, representatives of library and museum education programs, technology experts, sociologists, journalists and library and museum associations.

The report has sought to capture rich perspectives about the changing roles and responsibilities of libraries and museums. The publication describes each of the five plenary sessions and the working group recommendations that resulted from them: culture and communities; learning transformed; building the skills of library and museum professionals; and demonstrating public value. It includes descriptions of innovative case studies from around the globe and a summary of the concluding keynote lecture given by Vishakha Desia, president and chief executive officer of the Asia Society.

At a recent meeting, the governing board of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) endorsed a background paper on digital lending. The paper is now available in a downloadable version. The IFLA governing board had appointed a working group to draft the background paper as part of its work on the 2011-2012 Key Initiatives.

The paper attempts to provide an overview of the issues relating to e-books in libraries; summarise the current positions of publishers in both the scholarly publishing and trade publishing sectors; summarise the differences in the way that academic/research libraries and public libraries address the issue of digital collections; address the legal context for e-lending and library principles that must be upheld in any suitable models; and provide a detailed legal analysis of e-lending.

The e-lending environment is seen to be changing rapidly at this point in time, and the paper will be reassessed in the coming months in light of any significant developments. Revisions of the paper may take place in light of any assessment.

Interested parties may download the IFLA e-Lending background paper at http://www.ifla.org/files/clm/publications/ifla_background_paper_e-lending_0.pdf.

Students in the UK who recently participated in ebrary’s Global Student E-book Survey reported a greater preference for digital over printed books and higher usage than their global counterparts in a similar survey conducted in 2011. When asked how often they would choose e-books over printed books, 58 percent of UK students stated they would ‘very often’ to ‘often’ choose the digital version if it were available compared to 48 percent of global respondents.

Over 85 percent of UK students indicated they use e-books up to 10 hours per week and only 10 percent stated that they never use e-books. In contrast, 52 percent of global participants indicated they use e-books up to 10 hours per week, and another 46 percent stated they never use e-books. About 5 percent of UK students indicated they use e-books more than 10 hours per week compared to 2 percent of global respondents.

Additionally, more than 80 percent of UK students reported that their awareness of digital resources is good to excellent, compared to less than 69 percent of global participants. Only 6 percent of UK students indicated they did not know their libraries offered e-books compared to 38 percent of global respondents.

The 2011 Global Student E-book Survey was created by librarians and sponsored by ebrary, a ProQuest business. More than 6,300 students from academic institutions around the world participated in the informal study. Additional data will be forthcoming from approximately two hundred students who recently completed the survey in The University of Nottingham, University of Portsmouth, Coventry University, and The University of Central Lancashire.

ebrary will be presenting the UK-specific results and how they compare to the 2011 findings as well as a similar survey conducted in 2008 at the UCL E-Books and E-Content event on May 10. Anyone may register to receive a complimentary copy of the presentation by registering at http://www.tfaforms.com/243949. The 2011 Global Student E-book Survey and other studies sponsored by ebrary are available at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/surveys.

The National Library of Medicine, a component of the National Institutes of Health, has produced a new digital collection, Tropical Disease Motion Pictures. The collection comprises 46 titles from the Library's collections that illustrate the battle against tropical disease.

The materials range from research documentaries, interviews with noted scientists, and public health education campaigns, to films shot on location in regions beset by cholera, dengue fever, and yellow fever, demonstrating local and international efforts to curb their devastating impact. Produced between 1927 and 2007, the online content is a component of the Library's Digital Collections.

In the globalised economies of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Western societies came up sharply against the constraints imposed by tropical diseases. Cholera, malaria, yellow fever and other widespread diseases factored into the logic of empire: in war, commerce, and industry. Ambitious plans for global development were often thwarted by the burden of disease, with its attendant conditions of poverty, hunger, and loss of productivity. Through this collection, the western response to tropical disease is vividly shown, in multi-pronged campaigns of research, eradication, control, and education.

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has announced the establishment of four new discussion groups, which were approved by the ACRL Board of Directors during the 2011-2012 fiscal year. The new discussion groups are: The Digital Humanities Discussion Group; The International Perspectives on Academic and Research Libraries Discussion Group; The Leadership Discussion Group; and The Student Retention Discussion Group.

The Digital Humanities Discussion Group provides a venue for ACRL members to meet and share ideas related to digital humanities and the role of librarians in this emerging discipline.

The International Perspectives on Academic and Research Libraries Discussion Group serves to promote awareness and discussion of the international, transnational and global dimensions of issues critical to the future of academic and research libraries, to promote comparative study of academic library trends, issues and operations and to promote collaboration between academic and research librarians on issues benefiting from an international perspective.

The Leadership Discussion Group provides a forum for conversation, communication and collaboration about leadership and management issues important to academic librarians.

The Student Retention Discussion Group serves as a forum to discuss methods, best practices and assessment for developing case-by-case and programmatic efforts related to student retention.

Complete details on ACRL discussion group meetings at the upcoming 2012 ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim will be available in the Annual Conference Scheduler in early May. Fully registered attendees can create a personalised agenda and search for meeting, programme and event times and locations.

The Collections Trust has secured major European Commission investment in projects worth a total of €8 million to help museums, archives and libraries share their collections online safely and sustainably. According to Collections Trust CEO Nick Poole, this new investment represents a milestone in the Collections Trust’s international strategy and a huge opportunity to help museums, archives and libraries bring the richness of their collections to online audiences.

EUROPEANA INSIDE is a €3.8 million research and development project in partnership with 10 leading Collections Management Software providers, all of whom are members of the Collections Trust’s ‘SPECTRUM Partner’ Scheme. The project will develop open-source tools, enabling cultural organisations to manage the sharing and re-use of their Collections online.

PARTAGE PLUS is a 24-month project worth €3 million to digitise Art Nouveau objects, artworks, posters, and buildings to create around 75,000 items, including 2,000 3D models, of content for access through Europeana, the central channel for European culture online at http://www.europeana.eu. The project is being led by the Collections Trust, with partners from Member States across Europe.

ENUMERATE is a networking project which aims to provide up-to-date and comprehensive intelligence about the costs, methods and impact of digitising collections in museums, archives and libraries. Coordinated by the Collections Trust, the ENUMERATE network includes national coordinators in all 36 Member States of the European Union.

LINKED HERITAGE is a major initiative to help cultural organisations open up their collections as Linked Open Data, ensuring that it can be re-used to support new applications, innovation and creativity across Europe.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has revamped its Museums, Libraries, and 21st Century Skills initiative web page. Museums and libraries visiting the page will now be able to access practitioner videos, a PowerPoint presentation, an updated resource list, and a toolkit that will help them organise 21st century skills workshops in their communities. These new resources join IMLS's 2009 report and self assessment tool already in wide use.

The 21st Century Skills initiative is intended to assist museums and libraries as they leverage their resources to help individuals of all ages acquire such critical skills as critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation, communication, and collaboration. Combining strengths in traditional and digital learning, libraries and museums are reportedly well positioned to build the skills Americans need today.

The Making the Learning Connection Community Workshop Toolkit is based on a series of community workshops conducted by IMLS between June 2010 and May 2011. This toolkit is designed to assist museum and library leaders in planning and executing 21st century skills workshops in their own communities. It outlines the planning process, provides timelines, sample exercises and agendas, and brief descriptions of the 2010-11 IMLS workshops. Museum and library staff can also use a new 21st Century Skills PowerPoint and an extended bibliography in their presentations and planning.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has announced that the NLM is awarding 14 five-year grants, totalling more than $67 million, for research training in biomedical informatics, the discipline that seeks to apply computer and communications technology to improve health. The announcement was made by Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg, Director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

For more than 35 years, NLM has been the primary sponsor of biomedical informatics research training in the US. At its current set of informatics training programmes, NLM supports more than 200 pre-doctoral and post-doctoral trainees each year.

Distributed geographically around the country, NLM's informatics training programmes provide graduate degrees and in-depth research experience in one or more of following areas: Health care/clinical informatics; Translational bioinformatics; Clinical research informatics; and Public health informatics.

Publishers limiting library e-book lending, budget cuts and book challenges are just a few library trends of the past year that are placing free access to information in jeopardy. These trends as well as other are detailed in the 2012 State of America's Libraries Report recently released by the American Library Association (ALA) in conjunction with National Library Week (April 8–14).

The rapid growth of e-books has stimulated increasing demand for them in libraries, but libraries only have limited access to e-books because of restrictions placed on their use by publishers. Macmillan Publishing, Simon and Schuster and Hachette Book Group reportedly refused to sell e-books to libraries. HarperCollins imposed an arbitrary 26 loans per e-book licence, and Penguin refused to let libraries lend its new titles altogether. When Random House raised e-book prices, the ALA urged it to reconsider.

The single-minded drive to reduce budget deficits continued to take its toll on essential services at all levels of society in 2011, with teachers and librarians sometimes seen as easy targets for layoffs. Even the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services suffered budget cuts, and the Library of Congress lost nearly 10 percent of its workforce, it has been reported.

School librarians faced especially draconian budgetary challenges in 2011, it has been observed. Cuts began at the federal level in May 2011, when the Department of Education eliminated fiscal 2011 funding for the Improving Literacy Through School Libraries programme, the only federal programme solely for school libraries in the US. The effects were soon felt at the state and local levels.

Academic librarians and their colleagues in higher education in the US also continued to navigate a 'new normal,' characterised by stagnating budgets, unsustainable costs, increased student enrolments and reduced staff.

Even during a period of budget battles, however, the library community, led by the ALA, stood firm against censorship. Internet-age versions of copyright and piracy issues shot to the forefront as 2011 turned into 2012, and the acronyms SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (the PROTECT IP Act of 2011) became part of the vocabulary as the library and First Amendment communities took a strong stand against proponents of the legislation.

Book banning efforts were alive and well in 2011. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) received 326 reports regarding attempts to remove or restrict materials from school curricula and library bookshelves.

The State of America's Libraries Report documents trends in library usage and details the impact of library budget cuts, technology use and the various other challenges facing US libraries. The full report is available at http://www.ala.org/news/mediapresscenter/americaslibraries/soal2012.

Library information provider OCLC Research, US, has announced the appointment of Dr. Shenghui Wang as a Research Scientist, effective May 1, 2012. Dr. Wang will work from the OCLC European, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) headquarters office in Leiden, Netherlands.

Dr. Wang has been conducting research in the broad field of Artificial Intelligence with interests ranging from cognitive modelling, knowledge representation and reasoning and machine learning. Her work in natural language semantics and, more recently, in semantic interoperability in the Cultural Heritage domain is a particularly valuable expansion of the capacities of OCLC Research. Dr. Wang will be involved in current and future text and data mining work as well as linked data investigations.

Her most recent position was as a Research scientist at Wageningen UR. Prior to that, she did post-doctoral research at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Stanford Medical Informatics and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. In her new position, she will work closely with Dr. Jean Godby, Senior Research Scientist based in OCLC's Dublin, Ohio headquarters. Dr. Godby has recently done significant work aimed at the problem of automatically recognizing, extracting, and disambiguating named entities (the names of people, places, and organizations) from digitised text.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the availability of RFID in US Libraries (NISO RP-6-2012), a revision of the 2008 Recommended Practice that provides a set of practices and procedures to ensure interoperability among U.S. RFID implementations in libraries. By following these recommendations, libraries can ensure that an RFID tag in one library can be used seamlessly by another, assuming both comply, even if they have different suppliers for tags, hardware and software.

Since the publication of the original Recommended Practice, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published in 2011 a three-part international standard on RFID in Libraries (ISO 28560) defining the data model and the encoding of data on RFID tags for item management in libraries. The revised NISO Recommended Practice has been updated to reflect changes in technology and security and privacy measures, and to serve as a US profile for the ISO standard.

The Recommended Practice is available for free download from the NISO website at www.niso.org/workrooms/rfid/. Libraries, publishers, distributors, system providers, and tag manufacturers are all encouraged to review and adopt the recommendations.

Library information provider OCLC Research, US, has announced the launch of the ArchiveGrid Blog. This blog provides a place to highlight new ArchiveGrid collections and contributors, talk about how the new ArchiveGrid system is being built, and note things of general interest with an archives twist.

The ArchiveGrid Blog is part of OCLC Research's beta ArchiveGrid discovery system, now freely available and providing access to primary source materials held in archives throughout the world. ArchiveGrid helps researchers contact archives to request information, arrange a visit, and order copies - all from one simple, intuitive search. The OCLC Research version of ArchiveGrid will eventually replace the existing ArchiveGrid subscription service.

Anyone seeking historical collections can use ArchiveGrid's powerful search engine and user-friendly interface to retrieve results that include the title of the collection, holding institution, brief description and a link to an extended description. Interested parties can learn more about ArchiveGrid or archives in general with the ArchiveGrid Blog. A link to the ArchiveGrid Blog is available on the ArchiveGrid homepage.

Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, and the creators of the readers’ advisory service, NoveList have introduced LibraryAware, a product that is expected to revolutionise the way libraries promote their programmes and services. LibraryAware will be available during 2012.

In addition, NoveList is also celebrating communities that are ‘LibraryAware’ with the LibraryAware Community Award, co-sponsored by industry trade magazine, Library Journal.

LibraryAware is an easy-to-use online tool designed to maximise the library’s resources and services. The innovative resource will help libraries create professional-looking promotional materials and then deliver those materials via print, email, social media and online communication channels.

With LibraryAware, librarians can combine professionally-designed templates with their own pieces of ‘reusable content’ to carry information across an entire suite of promotional materials that can then easily be delivered to customers, community partners, elected officials and the media. LibraryAware improves what libraries are already doing with their promotional efforts by providing continually updated designs and best practice recommendations.

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has announced the appointment of Scott Walter to the post of editor for College & Research Libraries (C&RL). Walter will serve a three-year term beginning July 1, 2013.

Walter will serve as editor designate from July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2013, when he will assume full editorial responsibility. In the position of editor, Walter will also serve as chair of the C&RL Editorial Board. He succeeds Joseph J. Branin, director of libraries at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, as C&RL editor. Branin will work closely with Walter over the next year to ensure a smooth transition.

Walter currently serves as associate university librarian for services, associate dean of libraries and professor of library administration and library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and as an adjunct faculty member of the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science. On April 30, 2012, he will assume the position of university librarian at DePaul University in Chicago.

Published since 1939, C&RL is the official scholarly research journal of ACRL. The publication enacted an open access policy in April 2011. C&RL is available online at http://crl.acrl.org.

The Association of Research Libraries is seeking an energetic and forward looking leader to advance the role of research libraries in higher education and the broader information environment. The Executive Director will have a unique opportunity to influence public policy, reshape scholarly communication, and lead the transformation of research libraries through ARL's strategic agenda.

ARL is a non-profit, member-driven institutional organisation representing 126 research and academic libraries in North America. ARL's mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. The Association also provides leadership on new and expanding roles for ARL libraries to engage in the transformations affecting research and research-intensive teaching and learning.

The Executive Director serves as the chief executive officer of ARL and is responsible for the administration of all operations and programmes. The ARL Executive Director also provides oversight and counsel to two affiliate organisations founded by ARL, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI).

The Executive Director should be an authority on the ways in which universities and other research institutions integrate, preserve, disseminate, and create knowledge, and be able to serve as an articulate and effective spokesperson for the public policy issues facing research libraries in the 21st century. The incumbent must be well versed in the ways in which current and emerging digital technologies are changing the academy and the roles of research libraries. S/he not only must be ready to address the issues surrounding information production and access, but also must be a persuasive leader in the effort to build models of scholarly communication for the next century. S/he must have a grounded understanding of the North American research library community and the role of the ARL in it.

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The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has announced that registration is now open for the 53rd Annual Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) Preconference. The 53rd Annual RBMS Preconference, 'FUTURES!' will be held June 19-22, 2012, in San Diego. Registration materials are available on the RBMS website at http://preconference.rbms.info.

Preconference plenary sessions will focus on three components of special collections and archives work - use, object and discovery. Sessions will explore the ways in which special collections materials are used in the digital humanities, the future of discovery and access to collections made possible with linked open data and the potential future forms the book as object might take. The programming also features smaller and more interactive sessions, including 10 seminars, four panels of short papers and seven discussion sessions.

The 2012 preconference will also include three workshops to be held on June 19 at the Westin San Diego. All three workshops require an additional registration fee.

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Library information provider OCLC Research, US, and the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) have awarded research grants to Abdulhussain Mahdi and Arash Joorabchi of the University of Limerick, Laura Saunders and Mary Wilkins Jordan of Simmons College, and Carolyn Hank of McGill University and Cassidy Sugimoto of Indiana University Bloomington. The awards were presented at the ALISE 2012 Annual Conference Awards Reception in Dallas, Texas.

OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grants support research that advances librarianship and information science, promotes independent research to help librarians integrate new technologies into areas of traditional competence, and contributes to a better understanding of the library environment. Full-time academic faculty (or the equivalent) in schools of library and information science worldwide are eligible to apply for grants of up to $15,000.

Proposals are evaluated by a panel selected by OCLC and ALISE. Supported projects are expected to be conducted within approximately one year from the date of the award and, as a condition of the grant, researchers must furnish a final project report at the end of the grant period.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has announced that the Website for Small Libraries project, which began as an OCLC Innovation Lab experiment in 2011, is now available as a beta service for any library wishing to set up its own website.

By participating in the project, libraries will be able to quickly and easily set up a website that provides basic functionality for making small collection information available on the Web, setting up users, checking materials in and out, placing holds, and providing library contact, location, service and event information.

Four South Dakota libraries, as well as the South Dakota State Library, were part of the project’s pilot.

In order to make the site as easy to use as possible, the site relies on simple editing of predefined templates to populate the Web presence. It can take just a few minutes to have a library site up and available to patrons on the Web, as well as on mobile and tablet devices. The service uses a set of wizards to import collection and user information in a wide variety of formats. It uses statistical algorithms and WorldCat to determine structure and field contents to ease the import processes. Complexity is kept to a minimum by focusing on the minimum fields necessary to make collections accessible.

Libraries interested in signing up can do so at http://beta.worldcat.org/lib/. Participation in the project costs $500 per year and comes with a 90-day trial period. Libraries are free to import and export their collection and patron data as they try the service, as well as through the product life.

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The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) have announced the formation of Anvil Academic, a digital publisher for the humanities. Anvil will focus on publishing new forms of scholarship that cannot be adequately conveyed in the traditional monograph.

Works published through Anvil will be available through Creative Commons licenses on the Web and as apps on portable devices. The title production system will be developed jointly by NITLE and CLIR for use by other institutions, each of which would have the opportunity to publish under its own imprint. It is expected that Anvil will publish its first title in late 2012.

All of Anvil’s scholarly works will conform to the standards and protocols articulated by the Digital Public Library of America; Anvil will also work closely with the technical requirements of Europeana and Open Access Publishing in the European Network (OAPEN) guidelines.

The programme received startup funding from the Brown Foundation, Inc., in Houston, Texas. Stanford University, the University of Virginia, Washington University in St. Louis, Bryn Mawr College, Amherst College, Middlebury College, and Southwestern University will also provide funds and staffing. Anvil Academic Publishing will work closely with innovative programmes developed by the University of Michigan, especially MPublishing, and draw on Johns Hopkins University’s exemplary experience with digital humanities project development.

NITLE and CLIR will enlist additional publishers, scholarly societies, librarians, administrators, and faculty from member schools to participate in planning and developing Anvil-forged college and university publishing enterprises.

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American Library Association (ALA) President Molly Raphael recently led an ALA delegation to New York to meet separately with representatives from publishers Penguin, Macmillan, Random House, Simon & Schuster and Perseus. The representatives at these meetings included CEOs, division presidents and other executives.

Acknowledging that the e-book format will continue to accelerate, as will e-content in general, Raphael said that, despite their common mission of linking authors and readers, libraries and publishers have some goals that diverge. She said the discussions with publishers who already sell e-books to libraries focused on how to maintain and strengthen those relationships. Libraries, she said, play a key role in 'discoverability,' identifying the most relevant works for the communities they serve. The meeting revealed some misconceptions about how libraries operate. Once those issues were clarified, she said, some of the publishers' concerns were mitigated.

She said ALA agreed to provide feedback on any ideas they may have. She also said that publishers agreed to consider proposals from ALA.

One key issue that emerged was the concern of publishers that the ready download-ability of library e-books could adversely impact sales. From the viewpoint of publishers, there is some security in the 'friction' provided in borrowing a print book, which often involves two trips - one to pick up the book and another to return it.

Another issue that arose in all of the meetings was the influential role of intermediaries - aggregators or retailers - in library e-book lending.

She said there will be further communication with these five publishers, as well as contact with other publishers and intermediaries and additional activities within the framework of ALA's Digital Content and Libraries Working Group. She advised those interested to look for further communications from the co-chairs of the Working Group, the chairs of its subgroups and ALA leadership in the near future.

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The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has announced the recipients of the 2012 Excellence in Academic Libraries Award. Sponsored by ACRL and YBP Library Services, the award recognises the staff of a college, university and community college library for programmes that deliver exemplary services and resources to further the educational mission of the institution.

The Seattle Central Community College Library, winner in the community college category, was chosen for its team support for student learning through innovative information literacy offerings.

The Champlain College Library, winner of this year's award in the college category, impressed the selection committee with its nontraditional approach to instruction and positive student-driven environment.

Grand Valley State University Libraries, winner in the university category, was selected for the collaborative and effective approach taken to restructuring the library organisation and build an innovative, agile and flexible team-based organisation that is responsive to changing user needs.

Each winning library will receive $3,000 and a plaque, to be presented at an award ceremony held on each recipient's campus.

ACRL is a division of the American Library Association (ALA), representing more than 12,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. It claims to be the only individual membership organisation in North America that develops programmes, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians. Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role that academic libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments.

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The collection development staff of the US' Center for Research Libraries (CRL) recently met with senior representatives from two national site licensing organisations - the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) and Joint Information Steering Committee of the Higher Education Funding Council, UK (JISC Collections). The meeting was to explore the special challenges of licensing and acquiring primary source electronic resources, and preserving those resources for the long term.

The conversation reportedly focused on major databases of government information and archives, news, financial, demographic and geospatial information, and humanities and social science materials in non-English languages. The participants discussed the respective priorities and unmet needs of the three organisations with regard to acquiring vital but costly research databases.

CRL, CRKN, and JISC Collections have agreed to combine expertise and resources to improve access to these kinds of materials, and to work together to better support their respective national and regional research priorities and strategies. The group concluded that international collaboration on licensing and on tools for related decision-making is both essential and doable. Next steps will include the mapping of common national-level needs, assessments of key major databases, and a possible pilot for joint licensing. CRL will continue to post announcements as this partnership develops.

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The American Library Association (ALA) has announced the launch of a new publishing imprint, Huron Street Press, which is seen to take ALA Publishing beyond its traditional market of library and information professionals.

In line with ALA's mission to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all, Huron Street Press will publish a variety of titles designed to appeal to a broad consumer and library market. Its publications will seek to harness the expertise of the Association, while encouraging library use among the public, joining other initiatives such as @ your library and ILoveLibraries.

A trade imprint, Huron Street Press titles will be available through Independent Publishers Group as well as numerous traditional retail outlets in both print and e-book editions. Its first season of titles is now available for pre-order.

Huron Street Press is administered through ALA Editions, which publishes resources said to be used worldwide by tens of thousands of library and information professionals to improve programmes, build on best practices, develop leadership, and for personal professional development.

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The US’ Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has announced that registration is now open for its WebWise Conference, which will take place February 29-March 2, 2012 at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace in Baltimore, Maryland.

A signature initiative of IMLS, the WebWise Conference annually seeks to bring together representatives of museums, libraries, archives, systems science, education and other fields to explore the many opportunities made possible by digital technologies. George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM), partnering with the Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC), is helping to organise the conference.

WebWise 2012 will take up the theme of ‘Tradition and Innovation’, investigating how libraries and museums have used digital technologies to help scholars, students, educators and the general public understand history and the humanities. It will take note of the contributions that historical societies, public libraries and other small and local organisations make to humanities scholarship and education. Further, WebWise 2012 will illuminate the challenges these organisations have faced in doing digital work, highlight the often under-appreciated contributions they have made in this area, and bring them into more fruitful conversation with colleagues in larger organisations and in the arts and sciences.

Some of the topics to be covered by the conference include mobile technologies, crowdsourcing, data visualisations, use of digital technologies in preserving and providing greater access to oral history, and multi-institutional collaboratives. The pre-conference includes two half-day explorations of gaming and 21st century learners, and one full-day ‘unconference,’ also known as ‘Wise Camp.’

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The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and seven global partners have awarded about $4.8 million to international research teams investigating how computational techniques may be applied to ‘big data’ — the massive multisource datasets made possible by modern technology.

Fourteen teams representing Canada, the Netherlands, the UK and the US were named winners of the second Digging Into Data Challenge, a competition to promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. Each team represents collaborations among scholars, scientists, and librarians from leading universities worldwide.

The first round of the Digging into Data Challenge, held in 2009, was sponsored by four international funders and led to breakthrough projects. This year, an expanded group of funders, including IMLS, is supporting fourteen projects that apply ‘cyberscholarship’ to a wide variety of topics, such as developing a suite of tools to explore fully medieval charters that survive in abundance from the 12th to the 16th centuries; using information retrieval techniques to investigate changes in Western music; and using high resolution medical imaging scanning to study Egyptian mummies.

The sponsoring research funders include the Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK), the Economic & Social Research Council (UK), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US), the Joint Information Systems Committee (UK), the National Endowment for the Humanities (US), the National Science Foundation (US), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Netherlands), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Canada).

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has announced the availability of the final report of a study on the usage of electronic resources - MINES for Libraries: Measuring the Impact of Networked Electronic Services and the Ontario Council of University Libraries' Scholar Portal, Final Report 2011.

The study summarises findings on 34,000 randomly captured uses of electronic resources over a 12-month period from the 21 members of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL). ARL worked collaboratively with OCUL's Scholars Portal staff to implement a second iteration of the Measuring the Impact of Networked Electronic Services (MINES for Libraries) methodology that captures data on library user demographics, the purpose of use, and the location of the user at point of use when accessing electronic resources and services. The results show the increasing value derived from the use of digital content, and document the emerging use of digital resources in the humanities, and the soaring use of electronic resources from off-campus locations.

The data are currently used by Scholars Portal staff, as well as staff in OCUL institutions, to determine how specific populations apply digital content to their work, identify where library use originates to tailor services accordingly, gather usage data on digital collections to justify funding and inform collection development decisions, and assess the impact of networked electronic resources and services on teaching, learning, and research.

ARL implemented this methodology in collaboration with OCUL in 2004–2005 and again in 2010–2011. The latest summary report focuses on the 2010–2011 findings and provides a description of the major differences between the two implementations. The report is available at http://www.libqual.org/documents/LibQual/publications/MINES_OCUL2011.pdf.

Measuring the Impact of Networked Electronic Services (MINES for Libraries) is an online, transaction-based survey that collects data on library-user demographics, the purpose of use, and the location of the user at point of use offered to the library community through StatsQUAL — a gateway of library assessment tools developed by the ARL.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published issue 277 of Research Library Issues (RLI). This issue of RLI features a speech on reframing thinking about collections presented by Tom Hickerson, Vice Provost for Libraries and Cultural Resources and University Librarian, University of Calgary, at this year's ARL-CNI Fall Forum.

Also in this issue, Nicole Saylor and Jen Wolfe from the University of Iowa (UI) discuss the UI Libraries' experiment with crowd sourcing the transcription of Civil War diaries and letters. Finally, Sarah Laaker from Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) describes and analyses the WUSTL Libraries' exploration of providing 24-hour library access.

Research Library Issues is a Bimonthly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC. The freely available, online-only publication is released six times per year by the ARL. RLI focuses on the major issues that affect the ability of research libraries to meet the academic and research needs of the diverse communities they serve. RLI, no. 277 (December 2011) is freely available from ARL Digital Publications.

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The US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the Open Archives Initiative have been awarded a $222,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The grant is for a joint project to develop a new open standard on the real-time synchronisation of web resources.

Increasingly, it has been observed, large-scale digital collections are available from multiple hosting locations, are cached at multiple servers, and leveraged by several services. This proliferation of replicated copies of works or data on the Internet has created an increasingly challenging problem of keeping the repositories' holdings and the services that leverage them up-to-date and accurate. As we move from a web of documents to a web of data, synchronisation becomes even more important: decisions made based on unsynchronised or incoherent scientific or economic data can have serious deleterious impact.

This proposal is an outgrowth of the issues exposed in the context of the Memento project that developed a protocol for uniformly accessing time-stamped resource versions on the web. According to Memento project representatives, a stellar core team has been formed to devise the standard from the Sloan grant. It includes people that have worked on a variety of information interoperability efforts such as Memento; the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE), a protocol for describing aggregations of Web resources; Open Annotation, a resource-centric annotation framework; and the DSNotify change detection framework for Linked Data.

The new work item for the project has been approved by the NISO Voting Members. An interest group e-mail list will be established for those interested in following the project.

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E-books and research technology provider ebrary, US, a ProQuest business, has announced that the results of its survey of more than 1,000 librarians regarding e-book mobile and offline access is now publicly available online. Interested parties may register to receive the full results along with a paper authored by Dr. Allen McKiel, Dean of Library Services at Western Oregon University, at http://www.tfaforms.com/222151.

Among other key findings, the survey revealed that 92 percent of librarians find providing offline access to e-books more or equally important than providing online access.

ebrary will be showcasing its mobile app at the forthcoming ALA Midwinter event scheduled for January 20-24, 2012, in Dallas, Texas. The company recently launched download capabilities and will soon announce a dedicated mobile app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

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Members of the Philadelphia Chapter of the Special Libraries Association recently held their annual business meeting at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA, and voted to elect Valerie Ryder to the post of Chapter President in 2013. Valerie Ryder is Director of Information Strategy at Wolper Subscription Services.

She will serve as President-Elect in 2012. Ryder announced her intention to seek the position in September, following a year of service on the Chapter's Board of Directors and appointments as Chair of their Employment Committee and Vendor Relations Committee.

Ryder has more than three decades of experience in the information services industry. Prior to joining Wolper's management team, she led a staff of information professionals at Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. for more than 12 years and has also worked as an academic librarian and as a solo librarian.

Founded in 1919, SLA Philadelphia Chapter has more than 300 members who serve industry, business, research, educational and technical institutions in the tri-state area from the Delaware Valley to Central Pennsylvania.

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The US' Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded a grant of $249,871 to OCLC's WebJunction for a project aimed at helping communities across the country get started on the path to digital inclusion. The project is projected to complement IMLS' efforts to help libraries and other community-based organisations (CBOs) make strategic decisions about providing public access to broadband.

Working with its partners, TechSoup Global and the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), WebJunction will evaluate the needs of libraries, CBOs and city and county managers seeking to get started with digital inclusion. Based on these findings, the partners will create and test a summit agenda for local community gatherings to develop a shared understanding about digital inclusion and begin to create an action plan. The partners will make improvements to the agenda based on the test results and select a limited number of sites to participate in an in-person summit.

Participating sites will identify teams of library representatives, city or county managers, and CBO representatives to participate in the programme. Each team will develop and host at least one digital inclusion activity in its local community. The partners will also provide resources online at WebJunction, TechSoup Global and ICMA's Knowledge Network. In addition, partners will evaluate and publish outcomes and jointly report to IMLS on project effectiveness and lessons learned.

The National Broadband Plan released by the Federal Communications Commission in March 2010 noted that "absent action, the individual and societal costs of digital exclusion would continue to grow." The Plan recommended that IMLS provide leadership to libraries and CBOs as they improve digital adoption and use. In response, and in partnership with the University of Washington and the International City/County Management Association, IMLS has proposed a Framework for Digitally Inclusive Communities. The framework was developed with input from over 100 organisations and individuals with deep knowledge about public access technology and the diverse information needs of communities. IMLS and its partners are currently seeking public input on the framework.

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E-books and research technology provider ebrary, US, has announced the initial results of its 2011 Global Student E-book Survey. A comparison of the new survey with the same survey conducted in 2008 implies that aggregators, publishers, and librarians need to better collaborate to address students' information and research needs.

The survey of more than 6,500 students reveals that e-book usage and awareness have not increased significantly in 2011 over 2008. Preference for printed books over electronic books has not changed - both are still equally important, the survey noted. Further, it states that the vast majority of students would choose electronic over print if it were available and if better tools along with fewer restrictions were offered. The survey also noted that there is a need for reliable social media tools geared toward research.

Carol Zsulya, Head, Collection Management; Business/Economics Librarian, Cleveland State University, and Kevin Sayar, President and General Manager of ebrary, will co-present the initial comparison of the 2011 vs. 2008 Global Student E-book Surveys along with Cleveland State University's institution-specific results in 2011 at the Charleston Conference. A live webinar from the Charleston Conference will be available to anyone unable to attend the event and will begin at 12:45pm EDT. Interested parties may sign up for the webinar at http://www.tfaforms.com/222269.

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Lars Bjørnshauge has been appointed to the role of Interim Director for SPARC Europe. The announcement was made by Bas Savenije, Chair of the SPARC Europe Board. Bjørnshauge, formerly Director of Libraries at Lund University in Sweden and a long-standing member of the SPARC Europe Board, assumed overall management of the 93-member library organisation, effective October 19, 2011.

Bjørnshauge has over twenty years’ experience in the library community. Prior to his decade-long service as Director of Lund Libraries, he held management positions at the Technical Knowledge Center & Library of Denmark (DTV) in Lyngby, as well as serving as head of department at the Royal Danish School of Librarianship in Copenhagen.

Well known for championing innovative programmes, particularly in the Open Access arena, Lars founded the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and led the team behind it until recently.

Bjørnshauge succeeds Dr. Astrid Van Wesenbeeck, who is taking on a new role as project manager with the National Library of the Netherlands. One of Astrid’s activities will be working as the first-ever Open Access Officer at the Dutch National Library (KB) in The Hague.

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Information services provider EBSCO, US, has announced that EBSCONET ERM Essentials, the company’s e-resource management system (ERM), was recently upgraded to include improved navigation, hover-over previews, and more. These enhancements, a direct result of customer feedback, are designed to make this cutting-edge tool even more effective for the librarians who use it.

Improved navigation within the site provides the ability to maneuver through most lists at the detail level and easily find and browse related items, which helps librarians work more efficiently and with fewer clicks. Quick access to the relevant terms and conditions for a title or package saves time and provides the needed information in the right context. Once a title or database/package is found in the Collection Manager, the librarian can see the terms of use without having to link to the relevant license under which it was acquired.

In addition, access to information in general has been greatly streamlined with the introduction of hover-over previews on virtually every result grid. With frequently used elements shown in the preview, many key questions can be answered right from the result list — reducing the number of clicks and streamlining the operation. Numerous enhancements also have been made to features related to adding cost and license information to resources, including simplifications in how resources can be associated with licenses and the ability to assign costs to multiple fund codes or library locations. Processes have been made more efficient and more intuitive, enabling librarians to save time and provide a more accurate reflection of cost distribution.

ERM Essentials is said to significantly reduce the time librarians spend on data entry and maintenance, allowing them to devote valuable time to other tasks. It shares vital e-resource data and integrates seamlessly with other EBSCO Complete Management and Discovery Solutions, including EBSCONET, EBSCO A-to-Z, LinkSource, EBSCOhost research databases, EBSCO Discovery Service, and more.

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The ALA Office for Research & Statistics is inviting book proposals for the peer reviewed ALA Research Series.

The ALA Research Series seeks to expand the knowledge base of library research by publishing accessible and practical analysis that addresses topics of importance to libraries, librarians and professional educators. The annual series welcomes proposals for complete monographs and for articles toward an edited volume. The series seeks research based on methods other than surveys, such as observational research, content analysis, grounded theory research, ethnographic technique and historical research, as well as research that blends different methods.

Topical areas of interest to the review panel include shared collections, digital preservation and curation, archiving, disaster recovery, assessing return on investment for technology applications (e.g., Web 2.0), information literacy, new forms of engagement in learning/scholarship, 'digital citizenship' and the impact of economic downturn on library services. Research on other topics may be submitted. Research must have been conducted in the past three years and be near completion at the time of the proposal. For the purposes of the proposal, preliminary findings of ongoing research are acceptable. Only original research will be accepted.

The ALA Research Series is a peer reviewed publication with an editorial panel comprising experienced library researchers and researchers/practitioners. The reviewer panel has membership representing a broad array of expertise and perspectives in library research topics. Manuscript and proposal review is blind. Submissions from non-U.S. authors are welcomed if their research is international in scope or has obvious applicability to American libraries.

All submissions must be received electronically by 4:30 p.m. (CDT) on November 28, 2011. More information on the call for manuscripts, author guidelines and timeline is available online at http://www.ala.org/ala/professionalresources/publications/alaresearchseries/alaresearchseries.cfm.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published issue 276 of Research Library Issues (RLI). This issue of RLI features a speech on the future of the research university presented by McGill University Principal and Vice-Chancellor Heather Munroe-Blum at the May 2011 ARL Membership Meeting.

Also in this issue, Karen Hogenboom, Tom Teper, and Lynn Wiley from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign explore the challenges of collecting 'small data' (as opposed to 'big data'). Finally, ARL's Brandon Butler sheds light on two common misleading copyright claims.

Research Library Issues is a Bimonthly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC. The freely available, online-only publication is released six times per year by the ARL. RLI focuses on the major issues that affect the ability of research libraries to meet the academic and research needs of the diverse communities they serve. RLI, no. 276 (September 2011) is freely available at http://publications.arl.org/rli276.

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The Council of the American Library Association (ALA) has passed a resolution encouraging ALA members to tell their legislators, as well as local and national organisations and associations about the value to their library of Out of School library programmes.

It also urges Library Directors, Trustees, School Board members and supervising government bodies to ensure that libraries, of all types, dedicate the proper funding to insure that comprehensive Out of School library programmes for all children and teens are maintained.

The Council passed the resolution on June 26 at the ALA's Annual Conference in New Orleans. The resolution states that 'public and school libraries are venues where books, online resources, programmes, services and staff can improve the effectiveness of community Out of School library programs.'

In addition, it notes that 'Out of School library programmes that incorporate school and/or public librarians and make available the wide resources of the library enable young people to develop digital literacy skills to improve student achievement.'

Indeed, it says, 90 percent of public libraries offer programs in the evenings and on weekends for young people, with the U.S. Department of Education in 2007 showing a 30-percent increase in youth participation in library programs between 1993 and 2005, from 35.6 to 54.6 million.

Also, "The Dominican Study: Public Library Summer Reading Programs Close the Gap" shows that students who participate in a public library summer reading programme score higher on reading achievement tests at the beginning of the next school year than those students who do not participate.

The resolution cites research connecting participation in high-quality Out of School library programs with multiple benefits for young people, including gains in standardized test scores. It also cites savings associated with such programmes, with every dollar invested in Out of School programs saving taxpayers approximately $3.

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The Library Association of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the Library Association of Barbados (LAB) recently became the latest members of the Campaign for the World's Libraries. The library associations join nearly 40 others that have previously joined the campaign and had the campaign's @ your library logo translated into their country's language. The @ your library logo is currently available in 32 languages and in the colours of each partner countries' flag colours.

The Campaign for the World's Libraries is a public education campaign of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, the American Library Association and libraries around the world to speak loudly and clearly about the value of libraries and librarians in the 21st century. It is designed to showcase the unique and vital roles played by public, school, academic and special libraries worldwide.

Libraries everywhere can download the logos from www.ala.org/@yourlibrary/logos.

The Library and Information Association of Jamaica (LIAJA) launched its own @ your library campaign in partnership with the Jamaica Library Service (JLS), the Public Library Network and the School Library Network to provide reading activities under the theme 'Learn to Read-Read to Learn @ your library.' The objective of the partnership included developing lifelong voluntary readers and promoting the role and function of libraries and librarians. Through this collaboration partners shared resources and provided access to print and electronic reading materials to people of all ages while helping them develop literacy skills.

In Poland, the United States Embassy has launched 'Ameryka w twojej bibliotece' (America @ your library), a programme to provide books about America and English language learning materials and resources to local libraries in Poland. In support of its campaign, the @ your library logo is now available to all libraries in Polish from the @ your library website.

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The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has called for proposals for the design, development and delivery of a versatile and modular curriculum to support the use of the association's forthcoming revised Standards for Libraries in Higher Education (SLHE). The deadline for proposal submissions is September 26, 2011.

ACRL has a history of supporting librarians in understanding and using the association's standards and guidelines. To accompany the anticipated October 2011 release of the new version of SLHE, ACRL will be offering education and consultation services to assist librarians in understanding these new standards and applying them to the specific needs of their institutions.

The association seeks an individual or individuals who have the knowledge and ability to design and develop a versatile, modular professional development curriculum to support the educational efforts for SLHE. The purpose of this project is to provide a wide range of professional development opportunities through a variety of methods and modalities including in-person events, live webcasts and asynchronous web-delivered courses. This versatile, modular and multi-faceted curriculum will address the principles, performance indicators, outcomes, assessment and evidence as described in the standards.

The complete request for proposal (RFP), including details on project deliverables and the application process, is available on the ACRL website at http://www.acrl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/standards/standards_rfp.pdf.

The forthcoming revision of SLHE was developed by the ACRL Standards for Libraries in Higher Education Task Force, chaired by Patricia Iannuzzi of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, with input from the association membership and Board of Directors.

Questions concerning the RFP or proposal process should be directed to Kathryn Deiss at (312) 280-2529 or e-mail kdeiss@ala.org.

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The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the availability of the recommended practice providing a Test Mode for SUSHI Servers (NISO RP-13-201x) for a trial use period ending January 31, 2012. The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol is a NISO standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.93-2007) that automates the retrieval of COUNTER usage statistics by libraries.

The process of developing a SUSHI client requires testing against the SUSHI servers where usage data is expected to be harvested. The new recommended practice describes how content providers should provide access to their SUSHI Servers in a test mode so that clients can be set up easier and faster, which is of benefit to both libraries and content providers.

The draft recommended practice and an online comment form are available at: www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi/server. All content providers who provide COUNTER usage statistics are encouraged to implement the recommendations during the trial and provide their feedback.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has announced the publication of ARL Profiles: Research Libraries 2010, a report that includes a thorough content analysis of narrative descriptions of research libraries at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. The profile analysis has engaged qualitative methods to describe research libraries that complement the annual quantitative ARL Statistics.

The contextual information provided in the report documents the importance of the public good research libraries provide in an increasingly globalised environment by making their services more readily available. The report notes that research libraries are becoming an integral part not only of the physical but also the virtual academic experience in addition to setting standards and exploring best practices with national and international visibility, among other things.

When ARL directors were interviewed in 2005 and asked to describe a research library in the 21st century, there was general sentiment that the annual ARL Statistics and the toolkit of assessment services developed by ARL, though useful, were not adequate to provide important contextual information on the transformation of research libraries. ARL Profiles: Research Libraries 2010 documents in an evidence-based manner the changing environment and fills in this gap. Textual narrative descriptions of collections, services, collaborative relations, and other programmes, as well as physical spaces, capture the essence of a research library today and demonstrate the value delivered to library users.

Between 2008 and 2010, ARL member libraries submitted narrative profiles that offer an alternative way of describing research libraries. These narratives stand alone as important descriptive information of the state of research libraries at the dawn of the 21st century. The profiles allowed for a creative approach with a focus on critical qualitative categories emphasising institutional and research library community - level aspects of services, collections, and collaborative relations.

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The US' National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the availability of Physical Delivery of Library Resources (NISO RP-12-201x) for a public comment period ending on August 21, 2011. The physical delivery of library materials is an integral component of the library resource sharing process.

Despite the ever-increasing availability of e-journals, e-books and other digital resources, the movement of physical items is seen to remain a major concern and a major cost for many libraries. In one state, borrowing of returnable items increased by 107.4 percent in six years. A recent study showed that the average academic library spends more than $6,800 per year for delivery services, with some libraries paying as high as $60,000.

Physical Delivery of Library Resources provides recommendations for improving performance and reducing the cost of moving materials between by a library that owns an item and another library whose patron wants to use the item. Ranging from labeling and containers to automation and contracting with courier services, the recommended practice addresses both the lending and the borrowing library's activities related to delivering and returning a physical item.

The draft recommended practice and an online comment form are available at: www.niso.org/workrooms/physdel. All libraries involved in resource sharing, as well as delivery, sorting, courier and transportation service providers, are encouraged to review and comment on the document.

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Not-for-profit organisation Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) has announced that the EIFL Open Access programme has received the 2011 SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications.

EIFL was selected for its awareness, advocacy and capacity building activities carried out over the last three years and for its success in developing a large number of both repositories and open access journals run in EIFL partner countries.

Launched in 2006, the annual SPARC-Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications recognises an individual or group within Europe that has made significant advances in the understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications and/or in developing practical means to address the problems with the current systems.

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The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has named the Public Library of Science's (PLoS) PLoS ONE as the SPARC Innovator for June 2011.

Launched in 2006, PLoS ONE is an interdisciplinary journal and groundbreaking new model in which editors and reviewers do not assess the potential importance of the work submitted before publication. Instead, if the research is found solid, the author pays a flat fee and the same is uploaded on the Web.

The innovative new model has led to tremendous success for PLoS ONE - from both publishing and financial perspectives - and for the Public Library of Science. In 2010, PLoS ONE published 6,800 articles - as compared to 1,200 in 2007 - and became self-sustaining. In four years, this journal claims to have become the largest peer-reviewed journal in existence; and, on its current trajectory, PLoS ONE could be publishing 3 percent of all biomedical literature in 2012.

The SPARC Innovator program recognises advances in scholarly communication propelled by an individual, institution, or group. Typically, these advances exemplify SPARC principles by challenging the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public. SPARC Innovators are featured on the SPARC Web site semi-annually and have included University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor Venture Perez, the Optical Society of America, R. Preston McAfee of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena; Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences; student leaders; and others.

Individuals can nominate their colleagues as potential SPARC Innovators at http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator/nominate.shtml.

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The American Library Association (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) E-books Taskforce Chair Bonnie Tijerina has released a statement thanking HarperCollins for attending the taskforce's business meeting during ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans.

The discussion followed HarperCollins' February announcement of its current policy under which new titles licensed from library e-book vendors are restricted to 26 circulations. The license then expires.

One important outcome of the discussion is that HarperCollins will contribute to the E-books Taskforce's series of answers to frequently asked questions sent to the taskforce from ALA members that cover issues from basic questions about e-book readers to specific questions about licensing. The ALA e-books taskforce released its first FAQ addressing questions (PDF) from public libraries and will release more to address questions from school and academic libraries. HarperCollins' contribution will give the publisher's perspective.

According to Tijerina, HarperCollins understands that public libraries value sharing information and has expressed its commitment to provide models that ensure this information-sharing can continue. Libraries know publishers are seeking viable economic models so that they can continue to provide the kind of resources that the public expects at their libraries.

The ALA e-books taskforce looks forward to continuing this open dialogue so that libraries can offer the public the enhanced services available through the emerging technologies in today's e-book environment.

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Computer library service and research organisation OCLC, US, has announced that the University of New Brunswick Libraries is the first Canadian library to sign up to use OCLC Web-scale Management Services, the Web-based cooperative library management tools for metadata management, acquisitions, circulation, license management and workflow improvement.

As a member of the OCLC Web-scale Management Services Advisory Council, John Teskey, Director of Libraries, University of New Brunswick, helped to shape and guide development of the innovative new cloud-based library management services.

The University of New Brunswick was interested in keeping costs down and at the same time, wanted to offer emerging and transformative services to students and faculty. The University plans to have OCLC Web-scale Management Services in production by May 2012, ultimately using cloud-based services running from servers in a Canadian data center.

In addition to the University of New Brunswick and 35 libraries in the US, BIBSYS, the Norwegian library consortium, signed an agreement with OCLC to base its new library management system on Web-scale Management Services, which will include management tools for more than 100 libraries in Norway. The Tilburg University Library, in the Netherlands, announced earlier this month that it selected WMS and WorldCat Local as its new library management solution and integrated discovery-to-delivery service.

Of those libraries that have committed to using OCLC Web-scale Management Services, 21 are already in production and using the services.

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Computer library service and research organisation OCLC, US, has announced that the Tilburg University Library, in the Netherlands, has selected its Web-scale Management Services (WMS) and WorldCat Local as its new library management solution and integrated discovery-to-delivery service. The Tilburg University Library plans to become operational with WMS, the Web-based cooperative library management services, by June 2012.

The library made its decision after an extensive exploration of the current environment and of new developments, such as cloud computing and content integration—important elements to its staff and users.

By delivering services that are at the network level, Web-scale Management Services from OCLC offer libraries the opportunity to share data and business processes. Due to the service-oriented architecture, libraries can develop their own customised applications for library management activities that they can make available to their colleagues on the OCLC platform. With OCLC Web-scale Management Services, the Tilburg University Library will have a solution with workflow management, electronic resource management and integrated licence management, in addition to traditional tools for online library management such as metadata management, acquisition and interlibrary loan. Cataloguing will be done, as before, in the national cataloguing system GGC.

The WorldCat Local discovery-to-delivery service offers the Tilburg University Library simple implementation, a central knowledge base, access to a growing number of databases and collections, and full integration with WMS.

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Computer library service and research organisation OCLC, US, has announced that 32 libraries have committed to using OCLC Web-scale Management Services since the organisation announced that it was making its cloud-based library management services available to early adopters 10 months ago. OCLC Web-scale Management Services is the Web-based cooperative library management tools for metadata management, acquisitions, circulation, license management and workflow improvement. The early-adopter phase has now ended, and July 1 will mark general release of these innovative cloud-based services.

Boundary County District Library was among the first to join the early adopters, 15 of which are now using the services in full production. In addition to the 32 committed libraries in the US, BIBSYS, the Norwegian library consortium signed an agreement with OCLC to base its new library management system on Web-scale Management Services, which will include management tools for more than 100 libraries in Norway.

Libraries using Web-scale Management Services will lower the total cost of ownership for their library's management and free staff time for higher-priority services. As more institutions migrate to Web-scale Management Services, libraries will be able to share data, applications and workflow improvements with peer institutions, end users and partners.

With the early-adopter phase of the project completed, OCLC is now accepting orders for libraries interested in using Web-scale Management Services. More information on OCLC Web-scale Management Services can be found on the OCLC website.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published issue 275 of Research Library Issues (RLI). This issue of RLI features the Report of the ARL Task Force on International Interlibrary Loan (ILL) and Document Delivery Practices.

The report, affirmed by the ARL Board of Directors at their May 2011 meeting, states that it is the right of North American research libraries to participate in international interlibrary loan and document delivery activities. The issue is freely available at http://publications.arl.org/rli275.

Research Library Issues is a Bimonthly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC. The freely available, online-only publication is released six times per year by the ARL. RLI focuses on the major issues that affect the ability of research libraries to meet the academic and research needs of the diverse communities they serve.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the ARL Academic Health Sciences Library Statistics 2008-2009, which presents data that describe collections, expenditures, personnel, and services in 62 medical libraries at ARL member institutions in the US and Canada.

In 2008-2009, the reporting health sciences libraries held a median of 230,011 volumes, spent a total of $235,821,026, and employed 2,131 FTE staff. Expenditures for materials and staff accounted for the bulk of total expenditures, at about 50 percent and 41 percent respectively. Respondents reported spending a total of $83,986,222 for electronic materials, or an average of about 76 percent of their total materials budgets; this includes a total of $78,539,253 for electronic serials.

Interested parties may visit http://www.arl.org/stats/annualsurveys/med to download the data files.

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The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has announced the availability of RFID in U.S. Libraries (NISO RP-6-201x) for a thirty day public comment period, beginning immediately and ending on June 9, 2011. This revision of the 2008 Recommended Practice recommends a set of practices and procedures to ensure interoperability among U.S. RFID implementations in libraries. By following these recommendations, libraries can ensure that an RFID tag in one library can be used seamlessly by another, even if they have different suppliers for tags, hardware, and software.

Since the publication of the original Recommended Practice, there have been new developments with regard to RFID implementation in the larger book industry as well as in other countries. Most importantly, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published a three-part international standard on RFID in Libraries (ISO 28560) governing the data model and the encoding of data on RFID tags for item management in libraries. The revised NISO Recommended Practice has been updated to reflect changes in technology and security and privacy measures, and to conform to the new ISO standard.

The draft Recommended Practice and an online comment form is available online at www.niso.org/workrooms/rfid. Libraries, publishers, distributors, system providers, and tag manufacturers are all encouraged to review and comment on the document.

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The Medical Library Association (MLA) has awarded grants sponsored by EBSCO to four librarians to assist with travel and conference-related expenses to attend the MLA Annual Meeting in Minneapolis, May 13-18, 2011. The four $1,000 awards are presented annually to librarians who are early in their careers and currently employed in a health sciences library.

This year's grant recipients are: Trish Chatterley, public services librarian and liaison librarian to the faculty of pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences, University of Alberta-Edmonton, Canada; Anna Katherine Crawford, information services librarian, West Virginia University, Morgantown; Lara Handler, school of medicine librarian, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill; and Ryan Rafferty, assistant health sciences librarian, University of Illinois-Chicago, Urbana, Ill.

The MLA annual meeting provides an opportunity for health sciences librarians to present and discuss papers, posters, applied research and important issues related to health sciences information management. The grant recipients will be recognised at the Awards Ceremony and Luncheon during the conference on May 16, 2011. They will join more than 2,000 fellow health information professionals at this year's meeting.

To be considered for the award, applicants must be currently employed in a health sciences library and have two to five years experience. Each candidate must complete an application form and write a short essay answering the question: 'What do you expect to gain professionally and/or personally by attending the MLA annual meeting?' Applicants are judged by a jury comprising five members of MLA, appointed by the President of MLA.

The deadline for grant applications for the 2012 MLA conference is Dec. 1, 2011.

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Eight international research funders jointly announced their participation in round two of the Digging into Data Challenge, a grant competition designed to spur cutting edge research in the humanities and social sciences.

Digging into Data offers the arts and humanities and the social sciences the opportunity to explore new frontiers in research, forging not only international partnerships but new relationships between traditional scholarship and cutting edge computer science. The challenge asks researchers provocative questions such as how can we use advanced computation to change the nature of our research methods? That is, now that the objects of study for researchers in the humanities and social sciences, including books, survey data, economic data, newspapers, music, and other scholarly and scientific resources are being digitised at a huge scale, how does this change the very nature of our research?

The first round of the Digging into Data Challenge sparked enormous interest from the international research community and led to eight cutting-edge projects being funded. Due to the overwhelming popularity of round one, four additional funders have joined for round two, enabling this competition to have worldwide reach into many different scholarly and scientific domains.

The eight sponsoring funding bodies include JISC, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK; the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation in the US; the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada.

Applications are due by June 16, 2011.

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The Council on Library and Information Resources' Digital Library Federation programme recently announced its formal alliance with centerNet. Established in 2007, centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action that benefits the digital humanities and allied fields in general, and has special resources in the domain of cyberinfrastructure to offer humanities centers in particular.

The affiliation will focus on areas where digital libraries and digital humanities converge and need further exploration and understanding of each community's roles and responsibilities. Areas of likely collaboration include data curation; cyberinfrastructure; internationalisation; scaling up and scaling down; career paths; and publication and distribution.

The Digital Library Federation is a community of library practitioners engaged in and committed to building and sustaining digital libraries through collaborative effort and establishing best practices. The DLF community includes project managers, code developers, and digital curators.

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The American Library Association (ALA) has expressed its concern over the recent decision by publisher HarperCollins to restrict the lending of e-books to a limited number of circulations per copy. According to the ALA, this announcement, at a time when libraries are coping with stagnant or decreased budgets, threatens libraries' ability to provide their users with access to information.

Data collected by the ALA reportedly shows that libraries are responsive to the needs of their users. US-wide, 66 percent of public libraries report offering free access to e-books to library users - up from 38 percent three years ago. The marketplace for e-books is seen to be changing rapidly. ALA President, Roberta Stevens, has called on publishers to look to libraries as a vehicle to reach and grow diverse audiences.

The Equitable Access to Electronic Information Task Force (EQUACC) and the ALA will soon launch a website dedicated to developing a model for e-book lending. The website will offer visitors the opportunity to provide their ideas and comments.

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SPARC Europe, an alliance of European research libraries, library organisations and research institutions, will be accepting nominations for the sixth SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications and Open Access.

Nominations are open to individuals or teams, preferably within Europe, who have made significant contributions and discoveries in the field of scholarly communications but in particular to researchers that help illuminate the scholarly communications landscape; advocates that promote the development of new models of scholarly communications; developers of new tools that aid an open scholarly communication system; and new and interesting initiatives, projects or products that guide and encourage the use of new scholarly communication models.

An international panel composed of members of the SPARC Europe Board of Directors will consider the nominations. Self-nominations will not be accepted. Preference will be given to activity within the past two years. Nominations should be submitted to Carmen Morlon not later than May 15, 2011. The award will be presented during the LIBER conference in Barcelona on June 30, 2011.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, has announced the appointment of Dénelise l'Ecluse as the new Sales Director for the Europe, Middle East and African (EMEA) region. l'Ecluse will take up the position recently vacated by Eric van Lubeek after he became Managing Director on January 1, 2011.

In her new role, l'Ecluse will provide strategic and tactical leadership of the Sales Division, which includes regional offices in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK as well as the EMEA-wide Marketing Communications department. She will also take up a position on the OCLC EMEA Board of Directors.

l'Ecluse has an extensive background in the education sector and has worked in several senior sales and business development roles both in publishing and technology. Prior to joining OCLC, she spent five years at Autodesk, a developer and supplier of 3D design, engineering and entertainment software, where she was Northern European Education Manager. She has also worked in sales positions at Dutch consulting company Achillae, education and enterprise software producer Blackboard International and Harcourt Publishers.

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Library information provider OCLC Research, US, and Cambridge University have announced that both organisations will jointly conduct a six-month, JISC-funded investigation into the value of making collection metadata openly available in a sustainable manner.

The COMET (Cambridge OPen METadata) project will release a sub-set of bibliographic data from Cambridge University Library catalogues as linked data in multiple formats. This activity will test a number of technologies and methodologies for releasing open bibliographic data including XML, RDF, SPARQL, and JSON.

To enhance linking options, records will be enriched using two OCLC Research services to assign FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) and VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) headings. This will allow for effective information retrieval and semantic interoperability.

Starting in February 2011, COMET will document the availability of metadata for the library's collections which can be released openly in machine-readable formats and the barriers which prevent other data from being exposed in this way.

It is expected that the project will bring value to the wider community by contributing substantially to the availability of open metadata. Linking to FAST and VIAF headings will demonstrate the potential usefulness of a structured semantic approach to data. The project will also look at the value data enrichment offers for resource discovery.

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The Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) has published a strategy for providing access to unpublished materials online based on an approach created by OCLC Research and the RLG Partnership.

This approach is described in a document titled, 'Well-intentioned practice for putting digitised collections of unpublished materials online' and is the output of an 'Undue Diligence' invitational seminar held in the spring of 2010. During this event, OCLC Research convened a group of RLG Partner experts from archives, special collections and the law to develop and define streamlined, community-accepted procedures for managing copyright in the digital age that would cut costs and boost confidence in libraries' and archives' ability to increase visibility of and access to unpublished materials online.

The group acknowledged that, although there is risk in digitising materials that may be in copyright, this risk should be balanced with the harm to scholarship and society inherent in not making collections fully accessible. Based on this premise, they identified a practical approach to selecting collections, making decisions, seeking permissions, recording outcomes, establishing policy and working with future donors, which OCLC Research staff outlined in the 'Well-intentioned practice' document and posted online. Since then, a community of practice has formed around these procedures and many professional organisations have publicly endorsed them.

Based on this growing agreement within the profession, the TRLN member libraries created a Network's Intellectual Property Rights Strategy for Digitization of Modern Manuscript Collections and Archival Record Groups to specify the risk management practices to support their large scale digitisation project called 'Content, Context, and Capacity: A Collaborative Digitization Project on the Long Civil Rights Movement in North Carolina.' This project will present free and open online access to a total of forty digitised manuscript collections or archival record groups, accompanied by the broad summary descriptions and contents lists found in the finding aids created when the collections were processed.

For the first time, these resources will cross the boundaries of the four libraries' reading rooms, bringing together a vast quantity of research material for the era between the 1930s and 1980s. This free and open online availability of full collections is expected to facilitate new scholarly collaborations across institutions, and even nations, and will support the development of educational tools for students and the use of primary sources in classrooms.

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The American Library Association (ALA) has announced that Dora T. Ho, Sylvia K. Norton and Michael Porter have been elected to serve on the ALA Executive Board. The new board members were elected by the ALA Council in a vote taken at the 2011 ALA Midwinter Meeting held January 7-11, 2011, in San Diego. Ho, Norton and Porter will each serve three-year terms beginning in July 2011 and concluding in June 2014.

Ho has served on Council as councilor-at-large since 2003. She has also served on numerous committees and was president of the New Members Round Table (NMRT) 2001-2002. She is also a member of the Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC) and the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) as well as the California Library Association, the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association (APALA) and the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA), which she served as both president and treasurer.

Porter, communications manager with WebJunction in Seattle, has served on ALA Council since 2010. He has served as a member of the Equitable Access to Electronic Content Task Force and is an instructor for the ALA-APA Certified Public Library Administrator (CPLA) programme.

Norton, a state level coordinator for school libraries in Maine, has served on Council as the American Association for School Librarians (AASL) councilor since 2006. She currently serves on the executive committee of the AASL board of directors and has held numerous leadership positions within AASL.

The ALA Executive Board manages the affairs of the association. It is composed of the president, president-elect, immediate past president, treasurer, executive director and eight members elected by Council from among the members of that body.

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Dawson Books, a company specialising in the supply of books and complementary services to libraries worldwide, has announced the appointment of Jason Cherrington as Director of Global Sales and Service. Jason joins Dawson Books from technology company, Skype.

Technology is one of Jason's strong points having spent nine years in BT leading teams in product development, strategy, sales and customer service. More recently, he led a mobile applications and wifi solutions division, a specialist area for Jason who was guest speaker at Blackberrys Global conference in 2008.

Dawson Books is part of Dawson Holdings plc. The company develops and delivers integrated library solutions to worldwide customers.

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The American Library Association (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) is in the process of developing a digital literacy portfolio. During ALA's Midwinter Meeting in January, OITP staff began meeting with a range of ALA member groups to learn more about current efforts and to help inform the portfolio development.

One outcome of the Midwinter meetings is that OITP's Advisory Committee is supporting an OITP task force that would delve into digital literacy issues and include representatives from interested ALA units. A formal proposal to the Advisory Committee is forthcoming, after which time OITP will connect with other ALA units to establish task force membership.

OITP is also in communication with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), one of the US government agencies working on digital literacy issues as an outgrowth of recommendations made in the National Broadband Plan. The Digital Literacy Portal is one of the initiatives under way at NTIA.

NTIA has issued a request for organisations - including libraries - that are engaged in digital literacy projects to submit content to be considered for inclusion in its Digital Literacy Portal. OITP will be coordinating with NTIA staff in the collection of library content for the portal. NTIA staffers are reportedly working diligently to make sure that content on the portal is collected from a wide range of community-based organisations, including libraries.

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Geek the Library, a community awareness campaign, has positively changed community perceptions about libraries in a pilot, according to a new OCLC membership report. The campaign is designed to highlight the value of public libraries and inform the public about critical library funding issues. The OCLC report, titled 'Geek the Library: A Community Awareness Campaign', seeks to offer a comprehensive overview of the pilot campaign completed in 2010.

Geek the Library was piloted in two primary regions: southern Georgia and central Iowa, with additional communities added later in Georgia, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. Market surveys were conducted before and after the pilot campaign, campaign elements were tracked and direct feedback was sought from nearly 100 participating libraries. It has been confirmed that the campaign not only garners attention, but it actually helps change public perceptions about the library, librarians and public library funding.

OCLC is currently conducting a programme to help US public libraries implement the campaign locally. Interested libraries can visit www.get.geekthelibrary.org for more information. Libraries adopting the campaign reportedly benefit from the results documented in the report, including an overview of the pilot implementation and strategy; results from quantitative and qualitative research conducted to test the impact of the campaign; and analysis of feedback from pilot participants.

Geek the Library was developed based on the results of OCLC's research published in From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America. The pilot campaign was funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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The Library Copyright Alliance has released 'The Impact of the Supreme Court's Decision in Costco v. Omega on Libraries'. Prepared by Jonathan Band, the concise, informative paper examines the much-discussed Costco v. Omega non-decision, which left in place a controversial 9th Circuit ruling that could have significant consequences for library lending practices.

The first sale doctrine lets purchasers of lawful copies of copyrighted works re-sell, donate, lend, or otherwise dispose of their copy. If not for first sale, or some other balancing exception, copyright holders could ban purchasers from all of these practices, essentially controlling how individuals or institutions such as libraries use cultural products that they own.

In his analysis, Band explains that libraries are still on sound footing in lending foreign-made copies in their collections. He gives a range of alternative justifications for lending that should cover the vast majority of situations that institutions face on a regular basis.

For libraries in the 9th Circuit, first sale still applies if a foreign-made copy was sold domestically by an authorised party. Libraries in other circuits can also rely on the Ninth Circuit's Drugstore Emporium exception. The §602(a)(3)(C) provision for importation by scholarly, educational, and religious organisations should make it possible to lend materials lawfully imported for the purpose of lending. Implied license and fair use are powerful and flexible doctrines that should capture many library uses.

The paper is available for download from http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/lcacostco013111.pdf.

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Global library cooperative OCLC, US, and Amigos Library Services have entered into a new partnership to provide libraries with expanded implementation, training and education services for OCLC's new Web-scale Management Services. With over 600 members, Amigos claims to be one of the largest consortia of libraries and cultural heritage institutions in the US.

Amigos and OCLC have collaborated for many years to jointly provide extensive training, consulting and education services for OCLC's full suite of services for libraries and consortia. The new partnership programme builds on this foundation to provide member libraries the support they will need as they implement the next generation of cooperative library services. The Amigos team of library service professionals will work with libraries to help them with project management, implementation and training for OCLC's new Web-scale Management Services, the next-generation Web-based suite of library management tools for metadata management, acquisitions, circulation and license management.

The new partnership agreement will also continue the work the two organisations began in 2009 to streamline and enhance support, billing, reporting and other administrative services that will increase efficiencies and deliver additional cost savings to members.

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Susan Hildreth's nomination to be director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) was confirmed by unanimous consent by the United States Senate. The Institute, an independent United States government agency, is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 122,000 libraries and 17,500 museums.

Hildreth was previously appointed as California's state librarian by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Prior to her position as California state librarian, Hildreth was at the San Francisco Public Library, where she served as deputy director and then city librarian. Her background also includes five years as deputy library director at the Sacramento Public Library, several years as Placer County's head librarian and four years as library director for the Benicia Public Library, all in California.

Hildreth will serve a four-year term as the Director of the Institute. The directorship of the Institute alternates between individuals from the museum and library communities. She succeeds Marsha L. Semmel, who served as IMLS Acting Director since March 14, following the departure of IMLS Director Anne-Imelda M. Radice at the conclusion of her four-year term. Semmel is currently the deputy director for museums and director for strategic partnerships.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute's mission is to create strong libraries and museums that connect people to information and ideas.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has announced that issue 273 of Research Library Issues (RLI) focuses on several critical public policy issues of importance to the research library community.

This issue of RLI features articles on net neutrality, fair use, and open access to federally funded research. Guest editor, Prudence Adler, sets the stage for these articles as she describes how these issues are inextricably linked to one another. The issue is freely available on the web at http://publications.arl.org/rli273.

Research Library Issues is a Bimonthly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC. The freely available, online-only publication is released six times per year by the ARL. RLI focuses on the major issues that affect the ability of research libraries to meet the academic and research needs of the diverse communities they serve.

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The UK's Open University (OU) is reportedly the first university in the nation to open up access to online data from across the institution as part of the Linked Open Data Movement.

The JISC-funded OU's LUCERO (Linking University Content for Education and Research Online) project has enabled information stored across many of the university's websites to be brought together in a common, openly accessible location http://data.open.ac.uk.

Data about the OU's courses, podcasts on iTunes U and academic publications are already available to be queried and explored. The team is now working to bring together educational and research content from the university's OpenLearn and library material. At present, this mostly represents a technical platform. However, it will make it possible for the OU and others to create new applications to search and make use of the data.

The idea of 'linked data' - as advocated in particular by web inventor Sir Tim Berners Lee - is that the web should be seen as a medium for structured, interlinked and machine-processable information, as much as, in its current form, a network of documents presenting the information. Via LUCERO, OU is looking to make the initial step on behalf of UK universities to contribute to what was the original intention behind a World Wide Web.

Linked data is a set of technological principles to expose on the web not only web pages containing information, but also the underlying data in a way which is directly linkable and reusable. In embracing such principles, OU seeks to join organisations such as the UK, US and Australian governments, and international media outlets, such as the BBC and the New York Times.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has announced that issue 272 of Research Library Issues (RLI) focuses on developing the 21st-century research library workforce.

This issue of RLI features articles on new imperatives for developing a vital workforce, changing roles for academic librarians, recent administrative restructuring at UCLA Library, and the organisational value of post-MLIS residency programmes. The issue is freely available on the web at http://publications.arl.org/rli272.

Research Library Issues is a Bimonthly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC. The freely available, online-only publication is released six times per year by the Association of Research Libraries. RLI focuses on the major issues that affect the ability of research libraries to meet the academic and research needs of the diverse communities they serve.

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Norwegian consortium BIBSYS has signed an agreement with global library cooperative OCLC to deploy the latter's Web-scale Management Services for its new library system. The OCLC product is projected as a web-based suite of library management tools for metadata management, acquisitions, circulation, licence management and workflow.

BIBSYS provides library and information systems to Norway's university libraries, college libraries, a number of research libraries and the National Library. The latest agreement is the culmination of a review process over the course of a year to identify a replacement to the existing BIBSYS Library System.

According to BIBYS, an important factor in the decision to choose OCLC was that OCLC had started the process of developing a next-generation system, based on a service-oriented architecture, which has uniform handling of all media types. Because of the architecture, BIBSYS and its member libraries can expect to develop their own custom applications for library management activities. In addition, they can expose and share those applications as web services on the platform for other members to use. This ability to collectively innovate will purportedly generate cost savings, greater efficiency and the ability to better leverage collected data and intelligence.

OCLC's strategy is to move traditional library back-office operations and associated data to the network, sometimes called 'the cloud'. Web-scale Management Services are seen to integrate components such as acquisition, licence management and circulation with other OCLC services also operating at web-scale - including cooperative cataloguing through WorldCat and discovery through WorldCat Local - to leverage efficiencies, lower cost of ownership and free libraries to spend time on unique local services and innovations.

By delivering network-level services and not simply Internet-hosted solutions of current library services, OCLC's Web-scale Management Services are said to provide automation and management services to library organisations. This is seen to allow them to share data and workflows in ways never before possible.

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The American Library Association (ALA) has announced that Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels has signed on to remain in charge of the ALA through FY 2015.

The decision was made during the recently concluded ALA Executive Board's fall meeting at ALA Headquarters in Chicago. Fiels said he hoped five more years at the helm would help give the association the stability it needs to emerge through tough financial times.

Founded in 1876, the ALA claims to be the oldest, largest, and most influential library association in the world. The association has approximately 63,000 members, including not only librarians but also library trustees, publishers, and other interested people from every state and many nations.

Headquartered in Chicago, the ALA is governed by an elected Council, its policy-making body, and an Executive Board, which acts for the Council in the administration of established policies and programmes. The Executive Board is the body that manages, within this context, the affairs of the Association, delegating management of the day-to-day operation to the association's executive director.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published a special issue of Research Library Issues (RLI) on demonstrating library value by assessing organisational performance. The special issue focuses on ways in which ARL assessment tools help libraries improve their services and programmes and show their value to stakeholders.

In an introductory essay, guest editor Martha Kyrillidou, Senior Director, ARL Statistics and Service Quality Programs, highlights the range of articles in this issue and discusses the need to assess, improve, and prove the value of library services.

Research Library Issues is a Bimonthly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC (RLI). The freely available, online-only publication is released six times per year by the Association of Research Libraries. RLI focuses on the major issues that affect the ability of research libraries to meet the academic and research needs of the diverse communities they serve.

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The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), US, has announced the release of grant guidelines for Sparks! Ignition Grants for Libraries and Museums. This new grant programme will provide one-year grants of $10,000 to $25,000 for innovative projects that respond to the challenges and opportunities facing cultural heritage institutions in a rapidly changing information environment. The submission deadline is November 15, 2010.

Successful proposals will address problems, challenges, or needs of broad relevance to museums, libraries, or archives; will test innovative responses to these problems; and will make the findings of these tests widely and openly accessible. Grant funding may include all activities associated with planning, deploying, and evaluating the innovation, as long as the expenses are allowable under federal and IMLS guidelines.

The Sparks! Ignition Grants initiative is structured to encourage participation by museums and libraries of all types and sizes. Libraries and library organisations and that fulfill the general criteria for libraries may apply. Also, museums and museum organisations that fulfill the general criteria for museums may apply. Partnerships are permitted, but not required. No cost sharing is required for these grants.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services claims to be the primary source of federal support for the US' 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. The Institute works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development.

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Library cooperative OCLC has announced that Rein van Charldorp will retire as Managing Director of OCLC Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), effective December 31, 2010. Eric van Lubeek, currently Director of Sales and Operations for OCLC EMEA, will work with Dr. van Charldorp in transition and prepare to assume responsibilities as OCLC EMEA Managing Director, effective January 1, 2011.

Dr. van Charldorp joined OCLC in April 2002 after a long and successful career with Elsevier in the Netherlands and the United States. He brought substantial senior management experience, market knowledge and a publishing background to OCLC as the organisation began to grow services to libraries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Dr. van Charldorp will provide consulting services to OCLC on a part-time basis.

Eric van Lubeek came to OCLC in 2007 from Infor Library and Information Solutions (formerly known as Geac), where he was Managing Director of the library management systems business unit. He has more than 20 years experience in the library and information field working in consulting, sales and management positions.

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A community-based public awareness campaign, Geek the Library, is now available for adoption by any US public library. The campaign is designed to highlight the vital role of public libraries in today's challenging economic environment and to increase local library support. Geek the Library has proven ability to improve public perceptions about local library funding needs in test communities. Details about how libraries can use the campaign to increase local support are available at get.geekthelibrary.org.

With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, OCLC helped libraries in central Iowa and southern Georgia pilot the campaign from June through December 2009. Nearly 100 libraries and library systems participated. Four additional library communities tested the campaign on a more abbreviated calendar and budget. These include: Milwaukee Public Library in Wisconsin; Piedmont Regional Library System in Georgia (covering Banks, Barrow and Jackson Counties); Shelbyville-Shelby County Public Library in Shelbyville, Indiana; and Zion-Benton Public Library in Zion, Illinois.

Pilot libraries used the campaign to position the library as a critical asset-for individuals (e.g., to find jobs, re-educate themselves and enhance literacy) and for the community (e.g., access to technology, continued education and economic benefits). The campaign served as a springboard for initiating and expanding relationships with influential members of the community and the media, and for starting important local library funding discussions.

Interested libraries can register on get.geekthelibrary.org for more information about executing the campaign locally. Libraries and library systems that meet minimal commitment requirements for implementing Geek the Library will receive full access to all campaign material and initial campaign training from dedicated field managers. This team will focus on supporting participating libraries through the planning and launch stages, but will provide ongoing guidance, as needed.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has released a statement on a lawsuit filed by cataloging services provider SkyRiver Technology Solutions, US. Larry Alford, Chair, OCLC Board of Trustees, and Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO, released the statement which says the lawsuit is 'without merit' and a 'regrettable action'.

On July 29, SkyRiver and Innovative Interfaces, Inc. filed a suit against OCLC, alleging anticompetitive practices. OCLC believes that the lawsuit is without merit, and plans to vigorously defend the policies and practices of the cooperative.

OCLC's General Counsel, working with trial counsel, will respond to the legal action following procedures and timetables dictated by the court. The process is expected to take months or even years.

In the meantime, OCLC has assured its membership and all 72,000 libraries that the allegations will not divert the cooperative from its current plans and activities. These include maintaining and enhancing existing services, pursuing an ambitious agenda in library research and advocacy, and introducing new web-scale (cloud) services.

OCLC's current strategy is claimed to represent a collective effort by librarians around the world. It has been developed through ongoing dialogue and consultation with the Board of Trustees, Global Council, and Regional Councils in the Americas, Asia Pacific, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to the cooperative.

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Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Europe, an alliance of European research libraries, has announced CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, as the winner of the 2010 SPARC-Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications. The Award was presented at the Aarhus State and University Library during the LIBER 39th Annual Conference.

CERN was selected for its comprehensive approach to Open Access, especially in respect of the SCOAP3 project. SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing) is an innovative Open Access initiative for publishing in high-energy physics.

Launched in 2006, the annual SPARC-Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications recognises an individual or group within Europe that has made significant advances in the understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications and/or in developing practical means to address the problems with the current systems. The First Award was presented to the Wellcome Trust, with the second in 2007 going to the SHERPA group.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced that it is moving its Web-scale library management services from pilot phase to production with the release of acquisitions and circulation components to a limited number of early adopters.

Beginning July 1, OCLC will work with libraries that are interested and prepared to implement Web-based services for acquisitions and circulation. This will be followed by successive updates for subscription and license management, and cooperative intelligence - analysis and recommendations based on statistics and workflow evaluation among participating libraries. The cloud computing environment and agile development methodology will facilitate incremental updates while minimising impact to library operations.

For the past eight months, OCLC has worked with an Advisory Council and six libraries and library groups as pilots for Web-scale management services. These groups have provided advice to OCLC on an overall direction, offered new ideas that were not in the original development plan, and validated strategic positioning for the service.

OCLC Web-scale Management Services offer a next-generation choice for traditional, back-office operations. Moving these functions to the Web alongside cataloging and discovery activities allows libraries to lower the total cost of ownership for management services, automate critical operations, reduce support costs and free resources for high-priority services. It will also allow libraries and industry partners to develop unique and innovative workflow solutions that can then be shared across the profession.

OCLC will host an online event on July 21 to discuss how OCLC Web-scale Management Services can positively impact a library's budget and workflow. The online registration form for this event can be found at www.oclc.org/info/ala/webscalejuly21.htm.

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The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded OCLC WebJunction and the State Library of North Carolina (SLNC) a grant to continue work to provide library-based employment services and programmes to assist the unemployed. The $940,750 grant will fund work to conduct an impact and needs assessment on unemployment in all regions in the US, and create a corresponding curriculum that can be tailored to meet local needs so that libraries are better equipped to meet the needs of the unemployed.

WebJunction, OCLC's online learning community for library staff, and SLNC will conduct a train-the-trainer workshop and about 75 local workshops for public library staff working in the highest unemployment areas. They will deliver presentations at local conferences and make a free version of the workshop available online, in addition to hosting a Web site for ongoing communication among state libraries.

This project follows a previous IMLS funded project launched by WebJunction and SLNC to gather and share best practices for providing library-based employment services and programmes.

The IMLS grant was one of 38 Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grants awarded totaling $22,623,984.

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related informtion

Four scientists who have authored the Panton Principles have been named SPARC innovators. These include Peter Murray-Rust, chemist at the University of Cambridge; Cameron Neylon, biochemist at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, England; Rufus Pollock, co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation and Mead Fellow in Economics, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge; and John Wilbanks, vice president for Science, Creative Commons, San Francisco.

The Panton Principles put forth a set of recommendations for scientists to more easily share their data. The scientists believe that science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge. For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavors, it is crucial that science data be made open.

The authors advocate making data freely available on the Internet for anyone to download, copy, analyse, reprocess, pass to software or use for any purpose without financial, legal or technical barriers. Through the Principles, the group aimed to develop clear language that explicitly defines how a scientist's rights to his or her own data could be structured so others can freely reuse or build on it. The goal was to craft language simple enough that a scientist could easily follow it, and then focus on doing science rather than law.

The Panton Principles were publicly launched in February of 2010, with a website at www.pantonprinciples.org to spread the word and an invitation to endorse. About 100 individuals and organisations have endorsed the Principles so far.

The SPARC Innovator programme seeks to recognise advances in scholarly communication propelled by an individual, institution, or group. Typically, these advances exemplify SPARC principles by challenging the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities and the public. SPARC Innovators are featured on the SPARC website semi-annually and have included the Optical Society of America, R. Preston McAfee; Harvard University FAS; student leaders; and others. SPARC Innovators are selected by the SPARC staff in consultation with the SPARC Steering Committee.

Individuals can nominate their colleagues as potential SPARC Innovators at http://www.arl.org/sparc/innovator.

The Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) has released a new report, 'Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025.' The report seeks to prompt academic librarians to consider what trends may impact the future of higher education in order to take strategic action now.

Authored by David J. Staley, director of the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching in the History Department of Ohio State University, and Kara J. Malenfant, ACRL scholarly communications and government relations specialist, the report presents 26 possible scenarios for the future which may have an impact on all types of academic libraries over the next 15 years.

The scenarios are based on implications assessment of current trends and reflect a variety of potential futures for higher education. The scenarios represent a variety of themes relating to academic culture, demographics, distance education, funding, globalisation, infrastructure/facilities, libraries, political climate, publishing industry, societal values, students/learning and technology.

The report is freely available online at http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/issues/value/futures2025.pdf

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The June issue of the Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) College & Research Libraries News comprises a literature review performed by members of the ACRL Research Planning and Review committee. The committee has identified the '2010 Top Ten Trends in Academic Libraries.'

The ACRL Research, Planning and Review Committee is responsible for creating and updating a continuous and dynamic environmental scan for the association that encompasses trends in academic librarianship, higher education, and the broader environment. As a part of this effort, the committee developed a list of the top 10 trends that are affecting academic libraries now and in the near future. This list was compiled based on an extensive review of current literature. The committee also developed an e-mail survey that was sent to 9,812 ACRL members in February 2010. Although the response rate was small (about 5 percent), it reportedly helped to clarify the trends.

The committee's summary is seen to further explain widely discussed big picture trends. This includes the expanding need for scholarly communications leadership, budget pressures, the need for local digitisation, the growth of mobile services and technological upheaval.

The trends, listed in alphabetical order, can be accessed online at http://crln.acrl.org/content/71/6/286.full

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The American Library Association (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) has published a brief discussing how mobile devices are affecting library services. The policy brief is titled 'There's an App for That! Libraries and Mobile Technology: An Introduction to Public Policy Considerations.'

Authored by OITP consultant Timothy Vollmer, the brief takes a look at how the adoption of mobile technology alters the traditional relationships between libraries and their users. Further, it explores the challenges to reader privacy, issues of access to information in the digital age (including content ownership and licensing), digital rights management, and accessibility.

According to Vollmer, despite these challenges, libraries are embracing the growing capabilities of mobile technology and providing new, innovative services that extend the way libraries serve their existing patrons. The policy brief is available online at http://tinyurl.com/36ayubn.

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The Elsevier Foundation is seeking new grant proposals for the 2010 Innovative Libraries in Developing Countries programme. Sponsored by STM publisher Elsevier, the Innovative Libraries programme provides grants to library programmes in the developing world for innovative systems and services that improve access to scientific, technical and medical information. The deadline for Innovative Libraries proposals is September 15, 2010. Grants will be awarded in December 2010 and provide one, two and three year awards of $5,000-$50,000 per year.

The Innovative Libraries in Developing Countries programme supports the efforts of libraries in developing countries to improve their ability to put scientific, technical and medical information to work for those who need it. Past projects have included: expanding library information resources through digitisation and knowledge preservation; training and education programmes for librarians and researchers; developed-developing world partnerships to provide longer term technical assistance and training.

Active since 2002, the Elsevier Foundation provides grants to institutions around the world, with a focus on supporting the world's libraries and scholars in the early stages of their careers. Since its inception, the Foundation has awarded more than 60 grants worth millions of dollars to non-profit organisations working in these fields. In January 2010, $600,000 in grants were awarded to 12 organisations selected for their innovation and potential for impact in the developing world and academic workplace.

The online Elsevier Foundation application programme will accept proposals from August 1, 2010 to September 15, 2010, on http://www.elsevierfoundation.org.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published a special issue of Research Library Issues (RLI) on strategies for opening up content. The special issue focuses on new approaches being deployed to increase the amount of content that is open and available to the research library community worldwide.

In an introductory essay, guest editor Julia C. Blixrud, ARL Assistant Executive Director, Scholarly Communication, highlights the array of institutional, library, and author strategies now in use. She encourages the community to learn from the experiences of others as a way of identifying those strategies that have the best prospects for success in their own circumstances.
Research Library Issues is a Bimonthly Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC (RLI). The freely available, online-only publication is released six times per year by the Association of Research Libraries. RLI focuses on the major issues that affect the ability of research libraries to meet the academic and research needs of the diverse communities they serve.

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Akaza Research, a US-based provider of open source clinical trial software, has announced the availability of the OpenClinica Case Report Form (CRF) Library. The product is projected as a web-based resource that helps OpenClinica users find, share and re-use case report forms. It contains a collection of expert-reviewed CRFs based on CDASH standards. CRF Library also features a collection of CRFs contributed by members of the OpenClinica community and imported from open access repositories such as the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Data Standards Repository (caDSR).

The product is available at http://library.openclinica.org and free to community members with a www.openclinica.org login. Access to the library is available at two levels: free community-level access, and enhanced enterprise- level access (which is included as part of an OpenClinica Enterprise Edition subscription). Enterprise-level access provides enhanced resources for certain CRFs, such as CRF completion guidelines, rules and test scripts.

The CRF Library is projected to enable faster study startup by providing ready access to a well organised, searchable database of OpenClinica CRF templates. It seeks to promote data standardisation through re-use of CRFs that adhere to open industry standards. Additionally, it aims to minimise time and cost spent on study training, testing and validation through value-added resources and documentation (including implementation guides, CRF completion guidelines and test scripts) associated with the CRF templates in the library.

The OpenClinica CRF Library is expected to continue to grow as more standards-based forms are reviewed and accessioned by the OpenClinica CRF Library Review Committee, and as contributors submit CRFs for inclusion in the community collection.

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Library cooperative OCLC, US, has announced plans to host a free webinar on May 6, 2010 on reducing the environmental impact of interlibrary loan operations. In this webinar, OCLC Research programme officer Dennis Massie will discuss findings from a recent OCLC Research-sponsored study of the environmental impact of current interlibrary loan practices. He will also examine recommended practices for reducing the carbon footprint of resource sharing operations worldwide.

California Environmental Associates, the environmental impact consultant hired for this study, utilised data provided by OCLC and gathered during interviews with staff at a dozen US libraries. It correlated specific interlending practices with measurable impacts on greenhouse gas emission levels. These findings, along with key recommendations and best practices already in place at several participant libraries, will be covered in the webinar. They will also feature in a forthcoming report titled Greening Interlibrary Loan Practices, due to be published in early May.

Participants are encouraged to share their own techniques for greening interlibrary loan operations through the WebEx chat feature during the webinar. Participation is free but advanced registration is required. This webinar will be recorded and made available on the OCLC Research website and in iTunes.

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Molly Raphael, former director of libraries at Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon, has been elected president-elect of the American Library Association (ALA). James Neal, vice president for information services and university librarian at Columbia University, was elected treasurer, defeating Alan Kornblau, director of the Delray Beach Public Library in Florida.

As ALA president, Raphael will be the chief elected officer for ALA. She will serve a one-year term as president and a one-year term as Immediate Past President. Raphael previously served as director of the District of Columbia Public Library from 1997-2003. She has served in a number of capacities with ALA as early as 1976, when she was co-founder and first chair of the ALA committee and then the ASCLA Section on Library Service to the Deaf.

Neal will become ALA treasurer in June 2010 following the 2010 ALA Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. and will serve in this capacity through June, 2013. Before joining Columbia University, he served as the dean of university libraries at Indiana University and Johns Hopkins University and held administrative positions in the libraries at Penn State, Notre Dame, and the City University of New York.

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The OCLC Global Council elected a new member to the OCLC Board of Trustees and new leaders for next year during its first meeting (April 19—22) in Dublin, Ohio. Delegates representing libraries from 17 countries heard presentations and participated in discussions about the focus and shared values of the OCLC cooperative. Jan Ison, Global Council President and Executive Director, Lincoln Trail Libraries System, presided over the first annual meeting since OCLC governance changed from a single Members Council to a Global Council and three regional councils—Americas, Asia Pacific, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Global Council comprises member delegates elected by the Regional Councils and serves as a key strategic discussion forum and communication link between member libraries, Regional Councils and OCLC management and staff.

The Global Council elected Brian E. C. Schottlaender, The Audrey Geisel University Librarian, University of California, San Diego Libraries, to the OCLC Board of Trustees. Schottlaender will be seated on the Board in November. He has been University Librarian at UC San Diego since September 1999. Prior to joining UCSD, his 20-plus year career in libraries has included positions at the California Digital Library; UCLA; the University of Arizona; Indiana University; and Firma Harrassowitz in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Berndt Dugall, Director/Librarian, Universität Frankfurt, Universitätsbibliothek Johann Senckenbenberg, Germany, was elected Vice President/President-Elect of the OCLC Global Council. Dugall will serve as Vice President of Global Council beginning July 1, 2010.

The Council discussed several documents, including a Statement on Principles of Membership, OCLC Shared Values, and WorldCat Principles of Cooperation. Delegates will continue to review and revise these documents for consideration. Also, it heard reports from OCLC leadership and staff, and participated in panel discussions on a variety of issues, trends and emerging technologies in libraries.

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Academic and professional literature publisher Emerald Group Publishing Ltd., UK, has announced the 2010 Emerald Chinese Research Fund Award in the field of library and information science (LIS) research. The funding grant of up to £2,000 is expected to address the dissemination of knowledge for the social good with a specific focus towards the benefit of mainland China.

To be eligible for the award, the lead member of the research team must be based in mainland China. Each application is judged by a panel of LIS experts. The research must be of significance, particularly highlighting how it will benefit the social good. It must be original and innovative and demonstrate an outstanding contribution to theory and its application. It must illustrate the appropriateness and application of the methodology and demonstrate sound implications for theory and practice.

In a related announcement, the publisher also announced the 2010 Emerald Indian Research Fund Award in the field of LIS research. The funding grant of up to £2,000 is expected to address the dissemination of knowledge for the social good with a specific focus towards the benefit of India. To be eligible for the award, the lead member of the research team must be based in India.

The closing date for applications is August 1, 2010 and an initial short-list will be completed by September 2010. Winners will be announced in October 2010.

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The Medical Library Association (MLA) has awarded grants sponsored by EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) to four librarians to assist with travel and conference-related expenses to attend the MLA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., May 21-26, 2010. The four $1000 awards are presented annually to librarians who are early in their careers and currently employed in a health sciences library.

The MLA annual meeting provides an opportunity for health sciences librarians to present and discuss papers, posters, applied research, and important issues related to health sciences information management. The four winners will be recognised at the Awards Ceremony and Luncheon during the conference on May 24, 2010.

In order to be considered for the award, applicants must be currently employed in a health sciences library and have 2-5 years experience. Each candidate had to complete an application form and write a short essay answering the question ‘What do you expect to gain professionally and/or personally by attending the MLA annual meeting?’ Applicants were judged by a jury under the auspices of the MLA Grants and Scholarships Committee.

The EBSCO/MLA Annual Meeting Grants are awarded annually to librarians who might not otherwise be able to attend MLA without assistance for conference expenses. The deadline for applications for the 2011 MLA conference is Dec. 1, 2010. Information about the grant and application process for EBSCO/MLA Annual Meeting Grants can be located at the MLA website at http://mlanet.org/awards/grants.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has received a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a code of best practices in fair use for academic and research libraries. ARL will undertake the three-year project with the Center for Social Media at American University and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property in American University’s Washington College of Law.

The project is based on prior codes of best practice for fair use in other fields prepared by Professors Peter Jaszi and Patricia Aufderheide, who are part of the project team. ARL Law and Policy Fellow Brandon Butler will be coordinating the project with Prudence Adler, ARL Associate Executive Director.

The project will operate between April 2010 and March 2013. It will be undertaken in three phases - a research phase, a development phase and an outreach phase. In the research phase, the project team will conduct interviews with members of the library and legal communities. The project team, with members of the academic and research library community, will draft and publish the code of best practices in the development phase. Finally, during the outreach phase the project team will distribute and publicize the code of best practices.

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College of Arts and Sciences faculty members are invited to apply for funding to create new digital content. The Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences is funded by the college and coordinated by Cornell University Library.

Proposals that fall within the scope of the grants programme include creating new digital collections of resources regularly used in teaching or research including lecture notes, slides, photographs, printed documents and manuscripts; digitising collections already held by Cornell that are instrumental to support learning, teaching and research; and converting materials held by other institutions to support teaching and research at Cornell - especially combining dispersed resources to create new and enriched ones.

The programme seeks to build a library of resources to support scholarly and teaching activities. Digital collections created through this grants programme will become part of Cornell Library's digital library. While April 12 is the deadline to express initial interest, proposals are due May 3, 2010. Awards will be announced at the end of May.

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The American Library Association (ALA) and EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) have announced the winners of the 2010 EBSCO/ALA Conference Sponsorship awards. The seven awards, each in the amount of $1,000, are presented annually to professional librarians who are members of the ALA, enabling them to attend the ALA Annual Conference. The 2010 ALA Annual Conference is scheduled for June 24-30, 2010, in Washington, D.C.

In order to be considered for the award, each candidate had to complete an application form, which included an essay on how conference attendance would promote their professional development. The essays were then evaluated by a jury of library professionals for clarity of content, goals, benefits of attendance, commitment to ALA and the library profession, enthusiasm, financial need and potential for growth. The seven librarians receiving the 2010 EBSCO Conference Sponsorship were selected based on the quality of their essays, which addressed the question of ‘How will attending this ALA Conference contribute to my professional development?’.

The winners hail from Canada and six different states - from California to North Carolina - representing various types of library organisations, including academic and public libraries, as well as multiple librarian classifications.

EBSCO and ALA have partnered for more than 15 years in this special programme, enabling numerous librarians to attend the annual conference and to benefit from interaction with their colleagues.

The deadline for applications for the 2011 EBSCO/ALA Conference Sponsorship Award is December 1, 2010. Guidelines and application forms are available on the ALA Web site at http://www.ala.org, in the Awards & Grants section under Grants and Fellowships.

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The Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) of the American Library Association (ALA) has recognised three libraries for best use of cutting-edge technologies in library services. The libraries are: Contra Costa County Library in Pleasant Hill, California; North Carolina State University Libraries in Raleigh, North Carolina.; and Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts.

In June 2009, OITP and the subcommittee for its Program on America’s Libraries for the 21st Century issued a call for nominations to identify library programmes that are serving their communities with novel and innovative methods. After selecting the winners, OITP produced descriptions of the programmes to provide the library community with successful models for delivering quality library service in new ways.

The Library-a-Go-Go service from Contra Costa County Library uses fully automated touchscreen materials-lending machines to provide stand-alone library services in non-library environments. The NCSU Libraries implemented a cutting-edge service in response to the difficulty of creating and maintaining enough ‘course pages’ – recommended resources for specific courses and assignments – to meet students’ needs. The Course Views system provides pages for all 6,000 courses offered by over 150 departments at NCSU. Digital Amherst, a project of the Jones Library, Amherst, provides digital historical and cultural materials - photographs and other images, articles, lectures and multimedia presentations - to Amherst locals, scholars and tourists.

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The Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) and OCLC Research have awarded 2010 Library and Information Science Research Grants to Louise Spiteri of Dalhousie University and Laurel Tarulli of Halifax Public Libraries; Hsin-liang Chen and Barbara Albee of Indiana University; and Besiki Stvilia and Corinne Jörgensen of Florida State University. The awards were presented during the ALISE 2010 Annual Conference Awards Reception in Boston, Massachusetts.

Louise Spiteri of the School of Information Management at Dalhousie University and Laurel Tarulli of Halifax Public Libraries will conduct research to examine and compare how library users access, use, and interact with two social discovery systems used in two Canadian public library systems. The objective of the study, ‘The Public Library Catalogue as a Social Space: Usability Studies of User Interaction with Social Discovery Systems,’ is to provide insight into the design or modification of social discovery tools to ensure they provide the best user experience.

Hsin-liang Chen and Barbara Albee, of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, will examine the implementation of an open source library automation system (Evergreen) in Indiana public libraries and its impact on library users in the project, ‘Impact of Open Source Library Automation System on Public Library Users.’ The expected significant outcomes of this project are to identify: benefits library users receive from the implementation of the open source library automation system; library users’ interests in using the OPAC to discover shared library collections; and whether the consortia library collections gain more usage by library users due to the implementation of the open source library automation system.

Besiki Stvilia and Corinne Jörgensen, of the School of Library and Information Studies at Florida State University, will evaluate the utility of end-user generated tagging vocabularies (folksonomies) in maintaining and enhancing the quality of traditional knowledge organisation systems as sources of new terms, emerging concepts and relationships. The objectives of the study, ‘Assessing the Reuse Value of Socially Created Metadata for Image Indexing,’ are to evaluate the value of Flickr and Wikipedia metadata in generating useful terms and relationships for extending traditional controlled vocabularies.

OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grants support research that advances librarianship and information science, promotes independent research to help librarians integrate new technologies into areas of traditional competence, and contributes to a better understanding of the library environment. Full-time academic faculty (or the equivalent) in schools of library and information science worldwide are eligible to apply for grants of up to $15,000. Proposals are evaluated by a panel selected by OCLC and ALISE. Supported projects are expected to be conducted within one year from the date of the award and, as a condition of the grant, researchers must furnish a final project report at the end of the grant period.

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The Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) has released an issue brief that reviews the legal status of streaming entire films to students located outside of physical classrooms. This follows the recent news of a disagreement between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a media equipment trade association over the streaming of films to students as part of an online courseware system.

Innovations in secure streaming and online courseware systems are seen to hold significant promise for institutions serving faculty and students who demand increased access to institutional and library holdings. Many questions have been raised concerning the use of these technologies and copyright law, and the LCA issue brief aims to address these concerns and foster a balanced discussion.

The LCA issue brief explains characteristics that could increase the likelihood that a particular use will be allowed as well as the arguments that could lead a court to find in favour of educational uses. It also explains how these statutory provisions interact and, most importantly, how the scope of fair use is affected by the other provisions in the Copyright Act.

The Copyright Act includes several provisions that allow users to copy, perform, distribute or display works without permission from a rightsholder. The LCA issue brief surveys three provisions of the Copyright Act that could arguably support streaming entire films.

The strongest argument is observed to be grounded in Section 107 — the fair use provision. Fair use is a flexible, evolving doctrine that is often helpful to scholarly and educational users and users of new technology. Section 110(1) and (2) specifically address the issue of educational use of films, but they are seen to be less flexible. Whether these provisions will allow for a particular use will depend on the details of the use as well as how a court chooses to interpret certain key parts of the Copyright Act.

The issue brief is available online at http://www.librarycopyrightalliance.org/bm~doc/ibstreamingfilms_021810.pdf.

The Library Copyright Alliance is a coalition of library associations made up of the Association of Research Libraries, the American Library Association and the Association of College and Research Libraries.

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LibQUAL+ has announced that three libraries have been selected to receive in-kind grants to facilitate their participation in the 2010 LibQUAL+ survey. LibQUAL+ is a suite of services that libraries use to solicit, track, understand and act upon users’ opinions of service quality. These services are offered to the library community by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).

The selection of grantees was reportedly based on financial need, contribution to the growth of LibQUAL+, and potential for surfacing best practices in the area of library service improvements. The grant recipients are Elizabeth City State University’s G. R. Little Library, Castleton State College Library, and Capital Community College Library.

Information about applying for a 2011 LibQUAL+ grant will be available in March. There are two deadlines for submitting a grant application: June 15 and December 14, 2010.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has announced the appointment of M. Sue Baughman as Associate Deputy Executive Director. Baughman is currently Assistant Dean for Organizational Development at the University of Maryland, College Park. She will assume her role at ARL on March 29, 2010.

The primary role of the Associate Deputy Executive Director is to promote and facilitate the strategic development of ARL policies and programes. The position carries a mix of responsibilities revolving around issue analysis and programme development, strategic positioning and message development, and practical management and coordination accomplished, working closely with the ARL Executive Director and Board of Directors.

In her current position, Baughman works with over 200 library staff in every facet of the University of Maryland Libraries. Her duties focus on the development needs of individual staff, teams, and work groups, and the organisation as a whole. In her career, Baughman has held positions at a variety of types of libraries and library systems and has served on committees of numerous library associations. In all of these positions, she has been committed to finding innovative solutions to challenging problems.

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The US’ Secretary of Agriculture has announced the allocation of $100 million in funding for public libraries to provide educational opportunities and improve public services in rural communities. The funding – from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development Community Facilities - will be provided primarily through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Specifically set aside for rural libraries, the aid is seen as a lifeline for communities across the country who depend on their local libraries for their basic needs. These include Internet access as well as assistance with e-government services, literacy and homework programmes. Funds may be used to construct, enlarge or improve public libraries. This can cover costs to acquire land needed for a facility, pay necessary professional fees and purchase equipment required for operation. Funds can also be used to purchase shelving, furniture, computers, audio-visual equipment, distance learning equipment and bookmobiles.

Depending on funding availability, USDA Rural Development will provide up to $500,000 in additional Recovery Act dedicated grant funds to each of the State Offices for library projects.

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Optical Society of America (OSA) has announced that its open-access journal Optics Express has been named the first SPARC Innovator of 2010.

Optics Express publishes original, peer-reviewed articles in all fields of optical science and technology twice a month – within an average of 47 days after article acceptance. The quick turnaround, along with creative ways to highlight content – such as electronic cover images for every issue and Focus issues – have made Optics Express a sought-after publishing destination for authors and a top journal in the field. The journal, now entering its second decade of publication, is consistently ranked among the top titles in its field. Following the success of Optics Express, this year the Society is rolling out three more publications that follow the same open-access business model.

The SPARC Innovator programme recognises advances in scholarly communication propelled by an individual, institution, or group. Typically, these advances exemplify SPARC principles by challenging the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public. SPARC Innovators are selected by the SPARC staff in consultation with the SPARC Steering Committee.

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The Elsevier Foundation has announced the 2009 grant recipients, committing a total of $600,000 to 12 institutions from around the world to support the work of libraries and scholars in science, technology and medicine. The grant recipients were selected from 250 applicants worldwide for their innovation and potential for impact in the developing world, academic workplace and nursing community.

Six new grants have been awarded under the Innovative Libraries in Developing Countries programme. The recipients include institutions across Africa and Asia, and demonstrate how information resources can be used to address a variety of development issues – emergency management, the environment, boosting authorship and research skills and the distribution of clinical care information.

Within the New Scholars programme, the Elsevier Foundation has awarded four new grants to a range of international institutions. These have reportedly been pioneering new approaches to childcare, mentoring, networking, and policy advocacy in order to support scholars during the early stages of their demanding careers in science and technology.

An additional Elsevier Foundation grant has been awarded to the International Council on Nurses (ICN) and the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International (STTI) to hold ‘The International Summit on Nurse Faculty Migration.’ The event is a three day 2010 policy summit on the economic and health ramifications nurse faculty migration has had on both developing and developed countries. The summit will purportedly host 30 internationally recognised global nurse leaders who will commit to using the outcomes from the summit to advance the issue at the global level; consult with local entities on implementation; and coordinate and disseminate the results of local initiatives.

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Digital content products and technologies provider ebrary, US, has announced that it is extending the Patron Driven Acquisition (PDA) pilot programme for academic libraries through Spring 2010. The company intends to launch its finalised PDA product this summer.

Additionally, ebrary is conducting a survey to better understand libraries' needs and challenges with regard to PDA models. The questionnaire is available through January at http://tinyurl.com/ebrarypdasurvey. Results will be available later this year.

ebrary’s PDA pilot participants are given access to a selection of about 100,000 e-books and other titles from publishers such as Wiley, Elsevier and McGraw-Hill. Purchases are automatically triggered based on usage measured by page views, copies and prints. Titles purchased through the PDA pilot integrate with other ebrary products and services including Academic Complete, ebrary’s subscription product that seeks to provide cost-effective, multi-user access to a selection of more than 45,100 titles.

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The American Psychological Association has announced that it is accepting nominations for the 2010 APA Excellence in Librarianship Award. The award will be presented at the Educational & Behavioral Sciences Section (EBSS) Research Forum at the June 2010 American Library Association Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

The APA Excellence in Librarianship Award recognises contribution to psychology and behavioral sciences librarianship including instructions, project development, publications, research, or service. It is open to both librarians and allied professionals with at least five years of professional experience. The award comprises a certificate and a $2,500 cash prize.

Nominations should include a résumé or curriculum vitae; nomination statement (self-nomination, a description of the contribution and its significance within and outside of your institution); examples of work (photocopies, CDs, URL links, etc.); and letters of support (no more than 3; at least one letter from a dean or organisational leader outside the immediate work area). The deadline for receiving applications is April 9, 2010.

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The Special Libraries Association (SLA) has announced the results of its association-wide vote on a new name for the organisation. Voting in record numbers, SLA members failed to approve a proposal to change the organisation's name to the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals. Fifty percent of those members eligible to vote participated in the referendum, with 2071 voting yes and 3225 voting no.

The name change proposal stemmed from the findings of the Alignment Project, an intensive two-year research effort aimed at understanding the value of the information and knowledge professional in today's marketplace and how to best communicate that value. According to SLA 2009 President, Gloria Zamora, while the SLA will retain its current name, the Association will go forward with developing opportunities for its members to use the Alignment findings to demonstrate their contributions to the organisations that employ them.

SLA is a nonprofit global organisation for innovative information professionals and their strategic partners. SLA serves about 11,000 members in 75 countries in the information profession, including corporate, academic, and government information specialists.

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Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, US, has announced that the company will give a presentation on ‘How to Market your Library in the Digital Age’ at the Online Information 2009 conference.

Most libraries offer a plethora of digital resources, having invested in top quality educational databases from leading publishers. An equally critical investment for libraries is to develop a marketing strategy to ensure these resources are exploited to their full potential. A presentation demonstrating marketing your library in the digital age, and a case study of an innovative library marketing strategy will be led by Jon Anderson at Central Library, Cambridge and Sharlene Tilley, Executive Director of International Marketing at ProQuest. This presentation will take place on December 1, 2009, in the Pillar Room, Grand Hall, Olympia.

Central Library, Cambridge recently opened their doors to the public following a £7.5 million revamp. In their first week they received 17,000 visitors. Jon Anderson will outline the marketing strategy that was employed to achieve such success, as well as the benefits of working with a commercial partner such as ProQuest. He will also outline the development of this innovative library.

This presentation is open to anyone who has pre-registered to attend Online Information.

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Not-for-profit organisation Electronic Information for Libraries (Eifl) recently announced that it has been awarded a three-year $1.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to spark the development of innovative public library services using technology in transitioning and developing countries. The grant is part of the foundation’s Global Libraries initiative, which is working to open the world of knowledge, information and opportunity to many more people.

Technology has transformed public libraries throughout the world, providing access to critical education materials and communication services. Yet in many developing countries where the need is great, public libraries are under resourced. The Public Library Innovation Program (plip.eifl.net) will encourage public libraries to reach out to their communities, partnering with local government, business and other organisations to assess local needs and develop new services.

Calls for proposals will be held in two rounds. The first call is designed to gather great ideas that introduce technology to meet user needs and help members of the community improve their lives. Ten of the best proposals will be awarded up to $30,000 each for a one-year project.

The second Call will test the replicability of the top ten ideas from the first Call. Participating project teams in both rounds will come together for training and to share their experience. In addition, public libraries in any developing and transitioning country will be invited to take part in a special Innovation Award that recognises outstanding achievements. All the outcomes will be widely disseminated in key publications and conferences throughout the world.

The call for proposals, which began on November 16, 2009, will close February 28, 2010. The second call for proposals and the Innovation Awards will be open to all developing and transitioning countries in spring of 2011.

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The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has announced that Brinley Franklin, Vice Provost, University Libraries, University of Connecticut Libraries, began a one-year term as President of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), during the ARL Fall Membership Meeting held in Washington DC. He succeeds Tom Leonard, who will continue to serve as a member of the ARL Board of Directors and Executive Committee as Past President.

Also, the membership ratified the Board of Directors election of Carol A. Mandel, Dean of the Division of Libraries, New York University Libraries, as ARL Vice President/President-Elect. Three new Board members were elected by the membership to serve three-year terms: Carol Pitts Diedrichs, Dean of Libraries, William T. Young Endowed Chair, University of Kentucky Libraries; Deborah Jakubs, Rita DiGiallonardo Holloway University Librarian, Vice Provost for Library Affairs, Duke University Libraries; and Wendy Pradt Lougee, University Librarian, McKnight Presidential Professor, University of Minnesota Libraries.

The Board is the governing body of the Association and represents the interest of ARL member libraries in directing the business of the Association, including establishing operating policies, budgets, and fiscal control; modifying the ARL mission and objectives; and representing ARL to the community.

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Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), US, has announced a new service that provides added value to libraries and publishers by enhancing and delivering data that can work in multiple contexts and systems. The new service, Metadata Services for Publishers, takes publishers' ONIX title metadata, enriches it using WorldCat mining and mapping techniques, and delivers the enhanced ONIX metadata back to the publishers for use in their systems. The publishers' enhanced metadata is then made available early in the data creation process to libraries for use in selection, acquisition and technical services workflows. Information seekers also benefit from web discovery of this metadata via WorldCat.org, the Web destination for discovery of library resources.

OCLC's Metadata Services for Publishers is the result of a pilot project that explored the viability and efficiency of capturing metadata from publishers and vendors upstream and enhancing that metadata in WorldCat. The pilot followed release of the 2007 ‘Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control’ by the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, formed by the Library of Congress to address changes in how libraries must do their work in the digital information era. The ability to leverage upstream publisher data effectively was central to the Working Group's recommendations.

OCLC enrichment of title metadata saves publishers time and resources by streamlining internal workflows, and reducing in-house intellectual work and manipulation of title metadata. The organisation also provides validation, authentication and standardisation of publisher data for use by various partners (vendors, aggregators, booksellers) to increase the marketability of publisher ONIX title metadata throughout the publisher supply chain. OCLC Contract Cataloging for Publishers is another service that creates MARC records using publishers' electronic title data as a starting point. OCLC offers cataloging solutions for publishers and vendors that need to provide MARC records to libraries.

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The Special Libraries Association (SLA), a non-profit organisation, has announced that it has joined a newly formed Open Books Alliance calling for investigation into the Google Books Settlement. The alliance seeks resolution on issues of copyright, access, anti-trust and privacy. It brings together non-profits, library groups, corporations, the SLA and other consumer groups to call for a detailed investigation by the US Department of Justice into the Google Books Settlement.

SLA is joining this effort as it believes that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) must look into the full ramifications of this settlement on issues of copyright, access, affordability and privacy. The Association’s purported goal is to ensure that any mass book digitisation and distribution system addresses those key issues, and that access to such information remains open and competitive. It is looking for some additional answers on how the settlement will achieve a fair and accessible system.

The alliance anticipates an official launch in the coming weeks.

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