The British Library began restoring access to its online catalog on 15 January 2024, following a ransomware attack last October.

The loss of the main British Library catalogue has been perhaps the single most visible impact. The online system, for now, will be the only way to see the rarest books, maps, journals and music scores held by the library. The system for taking those physical objects into reading rooms is not yet running again. The majority of the Library’s key special collections – the archives, manuscripts and other unique items, will be accessible in an on-site capacity.

This post discusses seven contexts in which artificial intelligence (AI) is used. This post transitions from the more general AI discussion in earlier posts to one more focused on libraries, before looking more closely at potential library services and responses in an upcoming fourth post. The author concludes that the library discussion is necessarily moving towards forms of engagement, cautiously. For now, extra care and special attention are certainly warranted.

You can read the previous posts:

1. Generative AI and large language models: background and contexts
2. Generative AI, scholarly and cultural language models, and the return of content

This webinar, organized by OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association), was held in November 2023.

For the past decade or so, new jobs have emerged that illustrate an acknowledgment that libraries need to engage with evolutions in scholarly communication. At the same time, the creation of these positions and units strengthens a pressing need to develop new skills and expertise. Several questions were addressed during this webinar about the sense of preparedness of librarians to face the open access world; the role libraries play  in scholarly communication in a context which is not only digital but also OA.

Please find the panelist presentations:  Joanna Ball, Lai Ma, Rachael Samberg, Anna Clements, the responses to attendee questions and the recordings.

Bridging the gap between research and practice communities is more pertinent than ever because of the need for evidence in developing and evaluating library services and programs. The issues range from limited transfer of ideas from research into practice to a lack of education in research methods for library practitioners. This book introduces new voices from international research and practice communities into the discussion and contributes to the debate about the research-practice divide. Education and continuing training in research methods from international perspectives are explored and the experiences of researcher-practitioners from several countries highlight the issues.

Over three days, IFLA’s Governing Board met for its first in-person meeting since Rotterdam, in a week that marked 100 days since it took office. The meeting was an opportunity not just to look back at what had been achieved, but also to advance key projects, opening the way to further delivery in 2024.

David R. Lankes, Professor of Librarianship at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses the role that libraries and information professionals have in supporting appropriate use of artificial intelligence and tools such as ChatGPT. Included in the article is this useful LibGuide created by library staff at Northwestern University on the use of AI tools in faculty research.

To help libraries explore how to respond to these challenges, OCLC and LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) have launched a multi-year engagement program based on LIBER’s 2023-2027 strategy, which presents a vision for the future of research libraries. The series is called Building for the future, and this year it focuses on state-of-the-art services.

The series will include facilitated discussions on three relevant topics:

• Research data management (register today!)
• Data-driven decision making
• AI, machine learning, and data science.

Read the summary of the opening plenary.

The proceedings of IFLA Academic and Research Libraries (ARL) Section’s latest Webinar Series iteration (11 October 2023) titled Open science policies and best practices in academic and research libraries are now available.

Programme and background to the webinar is also available.

The Libraries of the ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) University Network (AUNILO), serves as a platform for discussing strategies and sharing experiences in navigating the evolving landscape of education. The 18^th AUNILO Meeting, which took place in August 2023, gathered a wide range of participating countries. The theme for the meeting was Co-Creating the Future of Libraries: Empowering Academic Librarians for Innovation and Impact.

This meeting brought to light the resilience, innovation and collaboration that defines academic libraries across the ASEAN member universities. It served as a testament to the continuous commitment of academic librarians in embracing change, promoting collaboration, and advancing their institutions’ academic goals.

Since 2012, the German National Library has been collecting websites in addition to e-books, printed works and much more. Of course, these are stored digitally in DNB’s web archive. A snapshot of the website is created at a specified time using a crawler and recorded in the DNB catalog. However, this journey of discovery is largely limited to the DNB’s premises in Leipzig or Frankfurt am Main – for copyright reasons. The DNB is not only active through cooperation at the regional level, they also work on web archiving in the international context as a representative of Germany.