All the key players in scholarly communications – funders, universities, libraries, publishers, and researchers – have an interest in improving access to scholarly journals. But the different constituencies do not share a common view of how this might best be achieved. Much attention has focused on open access and the benefits it could bring if adopted globally. But little attention has been paid to the dynamics of transition towards substantial improvements in access.

The current economic climate is placing pressure on UK Universities to maximise use of their resources and ensure value for money. In parallel, there is a continuing focus on the student experience and a desire that all students should achieve their full potential whilst studying at University.

This paper is a report on the cost-benefit analysis of digital long-term preservation that was conducted as a part of the National Digital Library Project in 2010.

The analysis was based on the assumption that a large number, perhaps as many as 200, of archives, libraries, and museums will share a preservation system. The term ”system” shall be understood as encompassing not only information technology, but also people, organizational structures, policies and funding mechanisms.

The cost analysis shows that a preservation system will incur, over 12 first years, cumulative costs of 42 million euros. If a dark archive will be built, the costs will increase by 3.4 million euros. Human resources and investments on information technology are the major cost factors. After the initial stages, the analysis predicts annual costs of circa 4 million euros.

The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB)’s mission is to connect people and information. One of its core responsibilities is to deliver digital scientific information to end-users, focusing on on-line access and services.

A significant number of documents, however, is only available to specific user groups (e.g. library members, students or researchers), or only remotely accessible by paying a fee.

This paper will discuss an approach to delivering information that focuses on creating on-line access to relevant scientific information to remote end-users. This integral vision is currently realized in two pilot projects, in cooperation with Dutch public libraries, research institutes and publishers.

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.