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.

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.

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.

Conceptes i instruments per a l'adaptació. Debat sobre vulnerabilitat, adaptació i ciutat

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.