LIBER Access Division
Newsletter no. 2
May 2008
Introduction
The purpose of this Newsletter is to inform
LIBER colleagues of new and ongoing work
in which the LIBER Access Division is
engaged on behalf of the LIBER
membership.
Digitisation
In October 2007, LIBER and EBLIDA held a
very successful Digitisation Workshop in
Copenhagen (see
http://www.libereurope.eu/node/261), with 95
participants from 23 countries. The
powerpoint presentations are available at
http://www.libereurope.eu/node/264.
OAI6
The Access Division is responsible for
leading on the organisation of the Cern
Workshops in Scholarly Communication. The
next CERN Workshop on Innovations in
Scholarly Communication (OAI6), will be held
at the University of Geneva on the 17th-19th
June 2009. At the local level, OAI6 will
represent a collaboration between Cern and
the University of Geneva, with the main
conference sessions being held in the
UniMail. See
http://www.unige.ch/workshop/oai6/ and
subscribe to the RSS feed for up-to-date
information.
The Workshop identified a series of
recommendations to the EU on the future of
European digitisation activity. These can be
found at http://www.libereurope.eu/node/306.
On 2 June 2008, LIBER and EBLIDA will be
meeting representatives of the EU’s
Commissioner for Information Society and
Media to discuss these issues.
At its Board meeting in January 2008, the
LIBER Board asked the Access Division to
set up a Task Force to investigate these, and
funding, issues for European digitisation
further.
DART-Europe portal for E-Theses
The Division is continuing to develop the
DART-Europe portal for access to research
theses across Europe. The portal, at
http://www.dart-europe.eu, currently provides
access to 89,883 doctoral theses from 34
DART-Europe partners. Discussions are
ongoing with a healthy list of partners to
increase the portal’s coverage.
One of the early outcomes of this work has
been the construction of a pan-European bid
to the e-contentPlus Programme in the EU for
major digitisation activity on the theme of
Travel and Tourism in Europe. The bid, called
EuropeanaTravel, involves 8 national libraries
and 8 research libraries, along with 5
supporting corporate bodies. If funded, the
digitised outputs on European travel and
tourism will comprise in the region of 3 million
pages of text, along with digitised
photographs, postcards, drawings, archives,
manuscripts, glass negatives and maps.
The Chair of the Access Division is giving a
keynote paper at ETD 2008 in Aberdeen (at
http://www.rgu.ac.uk/etd/). The meeting forms
the 11th International Symposium on
Electronic Theses and Dissertations and
takes place from 4-7 June.
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Digital Strategy: European Perspectives
The Chair of the Access Division gave a
keynote paper entitled Digital Strategy:
European Perspectives at the 2008 IATUL
Conference in April at Auckland, New
Zealand, and was invited to repeat the paper
at a consortium day for Austrian librarians in
Vienna in May. Many of the issues and
examples used in the paper are drawn from
European research libraries and from the
work of the LIBER Access Division. The
paper and powerpoints can be found at
http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/6686/.
As part of the bid, LIBER will construct an
OAI-compliant aggregator to harvest
metadata for the digitised materials from
research libraries and make that metadata
available to the Europeana portal (see
http://www.libereurope.eu/node/298).
The Chair of the Access Division will also
present a paper at LIBER’s Pre-Conference
in Turkey (prior to the LIBER Conference) on
1 July 2008 entitled Europeana - the View
from LIBER: How Can We Contribute?. See
http://www.ku.edu.tr/ku/index.php?option=co
m_content&task=view&id=2013&Itemid=2919
LIBER Conference 2008
The Access Division is co-ordinating a lively
session at the 2008 LIBER Conference in
Turkey. The session will take place on the
morning of 3 July. The Speakers are:
LIFE (Lifecycle Information for ELiterature)
This project is a collaboration between the
LIBER Access and Preservation Divisions,
phase 2 of which started in March 2007. The
purpose of the LIFE project is to develop
robust economic formulae for lifecycle digital
curation and long-term digital preservation.
Phase 2 is firming up the economic models
and testing them in a wider number of case
studies – including Open Access repositories
and the outputs of digitisation projects.
 David Prosser (SPARC Europe), who
will talk on current developments in
European Scholarly Communications
 Norbert Lossau (DRIVER), who will
talk about the DRIVER network and
programme
 Ralf Schimmer (Max Planck Digital
Library), who will talk about current
progress in the SCOAP 3 initiative
 Paula Kaufman (University of Illinois),
who will talk about the Library as a
Strategic Investment
 Martin Moyle (UCL), who will talk
about the DART-Europe Programme
 Sijboldt Noorda (Chairman, VSNU),
who will talk about digital challenges
for European academia
The LIFE 2 Conference is taking place at the
British Library in London on 23 June 2008
(see
http://www.life.ac.uk/2/conference.shtml).
Attendance at the Conference is free and
registration should be made via the website.
Highlights include: two academic economists,
who will assess the robustness of the LIFE
lifecycle and preservation formulae and set
the LIFE work in a wider context; Case
Studies from digital repositories (SHERPALEAP and SHERPA-DP); a comparison of
analogue and digital preservation costs using
the Burney Newspapers as a Case Study;
and a presentation by Neil Beagrie,who will
talk about digital preservation costs for
primary data. A round-table discussion will
look at the Next Steps in costing digital
preservation.
See
http://www.ku.edu.tr/ku/index.php?option=co
m_content&task=view&id=2013&Itemid=2919
The Divisional meeting of the Access Division
will take place on 2 July at 13.00 as a joint
meeting with the Collection Development
Division, with an emphasis on the current
review of LIBER Divisions.
Do join us at this free 1-day Conference if
you can.
Paul Ayris
Chair, LIBER Access Division
e-mail: p.ayris@ucl.ac.uk
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