Local users and global resources

Digital technologies have changed libraries, access to information, and indeed the world. The information landscape has been revolutionized, especially for academic and scholarly resources in university libraries.

Open Government Partnership Initiative (OGP) provides an international platform for domestic reformers committed to making their governments more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. OGP has 65 participating countries, which include among others the following EIFL partner countries: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Serbia, Ukraine, as well as Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi.

The International Literacy Association (ILA) has declared April 14 2015 - that’s today - ‘Leaders for Literacy Day’. To celebrate, the ILA has invited thought leaders, writers and bloggers, journalists, tweeters, instagramers and more to contribute to a digital dialogue about how best to advance literacy for all.

On 11 March 2015, the United Nations Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights presented her report ‘Copyright Policy and the Right to Science and Culture’ at the 28th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.

EIFL has released a new video that shows the impact of an EIFL Open Access Programme (EIFL-OA) supported project that succeeded in opening up critical research from Kenyan researchers to the world.

The video features students, librarians, faculty and research administrator (DVC) from the University of Nairobi. The university is the largest in Kenya, serving over 60,000 students.

This month, in wintry Lithuania, I visited Emilija Banionyte, president of the Lithuanian Research Library Consortium (LMBA), and her team in their office in the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania. Over a cup of hot coffee we discuss how LMBA ensures high usage of their licensed e-resources.

Jevgenija Sevcova, Manager of Databases at LMBA, explains that monitoring usage is essential in ensuring high usage, because it allows the consortium to identify and taregt institutions with low usage.

“Copyright divide in numbers”, the graph on the first page of the newly launched ‘The Copyright Manifesto. How the European Union should Support Innovation and Creativity through Copyright Reform’ tells a story.

We really didn’t know what to expect from the last WIPO meeting of 2014. Two previous sessions of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) had failed to reach agreement on its work, mainly due to opposition from the European Union and other high-income countries to the inclusion of libraries and archives on its agenda, that also led to a breakdown at the WIPO General Assemblies in October 2014.

EIFL-partner library consortia in three countries – Ghana, Kenya, Zambia commemorated their 10th anniversary in 2014.

“For me KLISC (the Kenyan Library and Information Consortium) is a dream come true,” remembers Jacinta Were, the former EIFL Country Coordinator for Kenya. “It was a difficult time with dramatic financial cuts to libraries and zero level budgets for journals. And then we collectively subscribed to information resources, and it worked!”