The open access movement in scholarly communication has considerably grown over the last ten years, and has subsequently driven an increase in the establishment of institutional repositories (IRs). This change led to develop and to define new professional roles and skills for the IRs’ effective management.

Traditionally, metadata curation has been regarded as a strategic element for repositories and therefore the library and information community has taken up the management of these digital archives. However, it has become clear that traditional librarian professional skills, such as metadata expertise and curation, leave now the way to a richer set of skills such as management and communication skills, technical skills as well as expertise on access rights and on preserving digital content.

LIBER's strategy (at http://www.libereurope.eu/node/59) has established Key Performance Areas for LIBER to add value to the library and information services available to European researchers. The five key Performance Areas are: Scholarly Communication, Digitisation and Resource Discovery, Heritage Collections and Preservation, Organisation and Human Resources, and LIBER Services.

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is one of the largest research and higher education organisations in the world focusing on engineering and natural sciences.

At present KIT, under the chairmanship of its executive board, is installing an extensive current research information system (CRIS) covering all institutes and facilities of the organization.

This project is based on the fact that a consistent overview on research performance has become fundamental for the international competition of research institutions and is increasingly important for strategic decisions on the executive level.

The recent report of the “Comité des Sages” recommends that “cultural institutions should make public domain material digitised with public funding as widely available as possible for access and re-use”. One of the objectives of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities is "encouraging the holders of cultural heritage to support open access by providing their resources on the Internet".

This paper will describe an on-going project at Bilkent University Library, Turkey, to create a series of instructional online videos aimed specifically at the so-called Net Generation (Generation Z) library users. These videos, which will be produced by doctoral students from the university’s Communication and Design department in collaboration with the Library and will be uploaded to the world wide web. The videos seek to present basic reference and information problems in the form of short, informal dramatic exchanges between a student and a librarian, rather than using the formal pedagogical format of most traditional online tutorials.

The promotion and development of information literacy for researchers has tended in the UK to be the preserve of university librarians. Although much good work takes place in practice to help develop appropriate skills and understanding, this is often haphazard. There is thus a strong case for greater join-up involving input from and strategic coordination between interested parties beyond the library sector.

This is the rationale for the creation of a coalition of partners, including information professionals, graduate school personnel, data management specialists, research supervisors and researchers. The programme of work overseen by this partnership has involved engaging with and building on existing initiatives, as well as initiating its own projects.

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.

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.

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.

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).