Representatives of the NUL at LIBER 40th Annual Conference
LIBER (Association of Euroepean Research Libraries / Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Rechereche) 40th Annual Conference was held in Barcelona, 29 June-2 July 2011. Dr. Tinka Katić, chair of the Croatian Institute of Librarianship, and Sofija Klarin-Zadravec, M.A., advisor for digitization, attended the conference on behalf of the NUL.
Getting Europe Ready for 2020: the Library’s Role in Research, Education and Society was the topic of the Conference, with aim to analyze the options of European research libraries available in order to respond to the needs of the science and research communities, in accordance with the Digital Agenda for Europe planned actions. Considering the domain of LIBER’s activities, the Conference included topics such as digitization, copyright, open access, cooperation, services for European scientists and researchers, digital protection and permanent storage.
From the domain of digitization of resources, projects of the so called mass digitization of resources were presented (6,000,000 books) of the Austrian National Library in cooperation with Google, digitization of books (200,000) by the library of the Complutense University in Madrid, also completed in cooperation with Google, and the project of digitization of old books in the project Early European Books, with goal to digitize books dated between 1450 and 1700 from the Royal Library in Denmark, the National Central Library (Florence), and the National Library of the Netherlands, in cooperation with ProQuest. The projects presented addressed the issue of the public-private partnership and the libraries’ growing need to raise the funds for larger digitization projects in cooperation with private companies.
The issues of copyright and digitization of cultural heritage were addressed by Bas Savenije, Director General of the National Library of the Netherlands. Mr. Savenije examined the role of institutions digitizing the resources in providing open access, and underlined the limitations imposed by European legislation. He additionally pointed out that for the resources digitized with taxpayers’ funds (where copyright has expired) there should be no limitations to access and use.
The popular topic of permanent storage of digital resources was addressed in several presentations. Noted was the project of the establishment of the national system of permanent storage of digital resources in Finland, headed by the National Library of Finland. The system is to be implemented in 200 institutions in the next 12 years, at an estimated cost of 42 million euro, with 4.5 million euro annual maintenance cost upon the implementation of the system. Other papers presented the system solutions such as HathiTrust from the library of the Complutense University in Madrid, and the ExLibris solution. The functionality of the ExLibris system was not presented in detail, only indicated.
Particular attention was attracted by two presentation, bringing an insight into technological innovations applicable in the domain of librarianship, particularly with aggregation of primary scientific results (Herbert van der Soempel) and the analysis of changes in libraries shifting from caring for collections and web tools to the improvement in services, better knowledge presentation and pushing the performance limits, in order to better respond to the research and learning requirements (Lorcan Dempsey).
The Conference was organized as a series of plenary presentations, and parallel sessions, in order to encompass as large a number of topics as possible, among which the use of mobile phones in libraries, the so called vertical search of library systems, the analysis of information literacy and user research techniques (scientists and students), system merging projects, such as association of repositories (Confederation of Open Access Repositories – COAR), associations in Europe (Europeana Regia) and similar.
As LIBER is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, the Conference involved the anniversary celebration as part of the programme.
