Recent research on scholarly behavior converges on conclusions about ecologies of information-related services in universities and across academic disciplines. In the past few years, numerous credible studies - conducted in Europe and North America - have offered evidence about information needs of a variety of researchers and their universities. While we have witnessed simultaneous evolution of discipline-based hubs and institution-based repositories, diverse international reports have identified gaps in digital infrastructure and library provision of services to manage research information.

The Norwegian National Library made a decision in 2005 to digitize all of it´s collection. Being a multimedia legal deposit institution the decision implies digitizing printed material, manuscripts, music, film, photos, radio broadcasts and television. A long term schedule for the total operation was presented to the owner, The Ministry of Culture in 2006.

Recent global changes, such as technological advances, evolving needs of students and researchers, and extensive budget cuts, are driving libraries to explore new operating models and to consider the benefits of hosted services of various kinds. As a vendor of library software for two and a half decades, Ex Libris has been anticipating the changes and building an infrastructure to support new, hosted modes of operation.

Ever since their emergence, both the products of scholarly communication and the supporting services have mainly targeted human users. Gradually, however, products are emerging that are more friendly for use by machines, or are even solely designed for them. The emergence of a machine-actionable layer of scholarly communication happens at different levels, and touches upon primary research results, research data, and the research process itself.
The presentation will provide an insight in this ongoing evolution, and will provide concrete illustrations of this trend. It will also zoom in on research data as a new first class objects in digital scholarly communication, some of the challenges related to fully integrating this newcomer, and opportunities and challenges for libraries with this regard.

Current efforts supporting eResearch environments have focused on large scale data capture and preservation challenges. Equally significant challenges, however, are presented by new paradigms in research methods and research communications. Simultaneously IT services are moving to the cloud, driving questions centered on the role of the institution and its library in a world where individuals can obtain solutions anywhere in the cloud. As these challenges are larger than any single institution can meet, the research library is called to consider reconceiving its role along lines that depart from our past. How will these shifts impact our models for organizing, operating and staffing research libraries? The presentation will touch on this rapid evolution and suggest some approaches to reframing our mental models of the research library in the context of the university.

This presentation extracts the essence of many related efforts to help libraries, archives, and museums increase access to their special collections. The Shifting Gears essay (which was presented to the LIBER conference in 2008) will be used as the launching point. Shifting Gears argued for scaling up the digitization of special collections by thinking in terms of access, instead of preservation (when we are preserving the originals).

IIn the mid-1990’s, the Complutense Library applied the growing body of new technologies to launch, in partnership with the Foundation for the Health Sciences and GlaxoSmithKline Laboratories, a pioneering project: the digitization of a biomedicine valuable collection. The project resulted in the Dioscórides Digital Library. Nevertheless, by 2006, results were rather limited and the digitization rate was very slow. Currently, Dioscórides Digital Library offers free access to 3,000 books from the 14th to the 18th centuries and approximately 50,000 engravings.

In September 2006 the Complutense University of Madrid and Google signed a partnership agreement intended to large-scale digitization of our collections in the public domain.

In a Public Private Partnership with Google the Austrian National Library will be digitizing its entire historical book holdings from the early 16th to the late 19th century. Within the next 6 years 600.000 public domain books of the library’s world famous historical book collection will gradually be made available online free of charge and without restrictions.

The announcement of the project "Austrian Books Online" in June 2010 triggered a broad public discussion regarding private co-financing of large-scale digitisation. A report recently published by the EC’s "Comité des Sages" emphasises the importance of public private partnerships in reaching the aim of bringing a critical mass of Europe’s cultural heritage online and mentions the Austrian National Library’s project.

In this partnership, Google is financing digitisation, full-text creation and book transportation while the Austrian National Library is bearing the costs for metadata creation, internal logistics, storage of the library’s digital copies and online accessibility. The library will receive a copy of each digitised book. Users will be able to access the digitised books via Google Book Search and via the library’s Digital Library. They will also be able to find the books in a normal Google search as well as in Europe’s cultural heritage portal Europeana.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the mobile services developed by the Rector Gabriel Ferraté Library (BRGF) of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), in Barcelona, Spain.

For several years the BRGF has implemented a considerable amount of technological features that have distinguished the library because of its technological vocation, but only those regarding mobile services are listed here.

We consider that the paper could be useful for libraries investigating new technological innovations to communicate and deliver their services to users in a moment when mobile services are an emerging topic in librarianship and information science literature.

By detailing the successive steps that have defined the as yet unfinished process to construct our mobile services portfolio we intend to present a detailed picture of the mobile services and features offered by the library in the university from a case study perspective.

This paper examines the developing partnership between the University of Leicester Library and the Research Support Office (RSO). It discusses the drivers and barriers to partnership, and the outcomes including the creation of a new role of Bibliometrician. We have discovered that joint work on promotion of open access, integrated research management systems and bibliometrics enhances research support and strengthens the Library and its visibility to researchers.