El programa INSPIRE3 de l'ETSEIAT (UPC) és una iniciativa adreçada a l'estudiantat per la realització de Projectes Innovadors Reals, el que constitueix una nova Experiència Educativa en Enginyeria, consistent en el desenvolupament per part de grups d'estudiants de projectes d'enginyeria reals i de contingut transversal en els quals l'estudiantat té l'oportunitat d'aplicar els coneixements i habilitats adquirits i desenvolupar-ne de noves, com ara: la creativitat, la intuïció, el pensament crític, les capacitats de comunicació i d'aptituds de lideratge, de gestió de projectes i de negociació.

És important assenyalar que les propostes sorgeixen de l'estudiantat, que en són els veritables protagonistes i responsables de liderar els projectes. El personal acadèmic juga únicament el rol de facilitador, conseller i supervisor.

Aquest programa extracurricular complementa el treball de desenvolupament d'aptituds i competències ja contemplat en assignatures dels plans d'estudi. En l'actualitat hi participen 120 estudiants en 9 grups de treball. En el pocs anys que porta aquesta experiència ja son forces els premis aconseguits en competicions i congressos organitzats a nivell nacional i internacional .
La majoria d'aquestes iniciatives són possibles gràcies al recolzament de patrocinadors externs a la universitat.

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.

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.

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 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.

To communicate the necessity of information literacy in the university and to draw attention to it as a possible subject, we created in 2006 a web-based general course model of information literacy. The course is based on the ALA standards and is now included in the university curriculum as a credit bearing optional elective course, giving 3 ECTS credit points. We relied on experiences described in professional literature: information literacy can be effectively taught in separate courses, and such courses should be offered by libraries as well. On the basis of the course, we have also created an advanced course for doctoral students, several specialized courses in information literacy integrated into subjects, and a nationwide course for gymnasium students.

How influential is scholarly communication? This is a question increasingly asked of librarians in the face of higher expectations around the availability and rapid provision of relevant data. These questions have traditionally been addressed by document output counts and the Impact Factors of journals that have been published in; while this is certainly useful to a degree, concern has been expressed about basing decisions on such limited metrics that apply to varying degrees to distinct fields and career stages.

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.