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eIFL.net
Dr Busiso Chisala, Technical Advisor to MALICO VSAT on the roof of Chancellor College Library, University of Malawi
eIFL.net Newsletter

No. 28 - July/August 2007


1. eIFL-related News

Feedback on the Greenstone Southern Africa Pilot Project

In our March-April issue we informed you that eIFL will be executing the Greenstone Southern Africa Pilot Project on behalf of the Koha Foundation (U.S.A.) to promote the development of digital libraries in Africa through Open Source solutions. Following our call for candidate institutions in Southern African countries to serve as sub-regional centre of the project, we are pleased to announce that the University of Namibia has been selected to perform this key role in coordination of and technical support for the project. For their part, the National University Library of Lesotho, the Lesotho College of Education Library, Bunda College Library in Malawi, and the National University of Science and Technology in Zimbabwe will act as national centers.

Upcoming eIFL 14th Advisory Board meeting

As usual, eIFL is getting ready for its annual summer advisory board meeting which evaluates work done in the first half of the year and prepares for the continuation of the work agenda for the second half. Board members Hannie Sander, Buhle Mbambo, Emilija Banionyte, Jan Andrjez Nikisch and Irakli Garibashvili, external advisors Heather Joseph and Arnold Hirshon, OSI representatives Darius Cuplinskas and Jean Claude Guédon and eIFL staff will hold a 2 day meeting at the Monastery of the White Friars in Cupramontana, Italy, on July 27-29.

The meeting will discuss important matters related to the eIFL’s participation in IFLA Durban in August and eIFL General Assembly 2007 in Belgrade, Serbia, on November 8-11. Other issues to be addressed will include plans for progress in all eIFL programmes, eIFL current and planned fundraising efforts, new models for membership dues, and feasibility study on membership enlargement. The Advisory Board meeting will be followed by one day Management Board meeting and a staff reunion.

Content of the eIFL new website

As you may have noticed, every month we are spotlighting one member country in the homepage of our website. These ‘success’ stories intend to give a detailed overview and celebrate accomplishments made by the national library consortia in advancing access to knowledge in their countries. MALICO superb contribution to establish VSATs throughout universities and research centers in Malawi is our spotlight until mid July. AzLIC successful moves towards the promotion of an ever growing variety of scholarly e-resources across Azerbaijan will be our summer story.

We are always glad to hear about the great things your library consortia are managing to do at a local level. If you want libraries in your country to be under the spotlight on the eIFL website, please tell us the story! To read previous spotlight stories, please go to: Spotlight.

The BBC radio programme The Word broadcasted on 22-29 of May was dedicated to libraries in developing countries. Rima Kupryte was one of the invited speakers and you can listen to the program at any time from our website at Media.

New article on eIFL in French available

eIFL work programmes in general and its activities in French speaking member countries in particular is being featured in the upcoming July-August-September issue of Arabesques newsletter to be released in the second half of July. This publication is prepared by ABES (L'Agence bibliographique de l'enseignement supérieur), the French national agency responsible for the development of the union catalog SUDOC with the collections in universities and other higher education institutions across the country. Arabesques gives account of initiatives in the field of library automation and management systems in France and elsewhere, and informs its readership about the latest trends and breakthroughs in library and information sciences world over. You can read Arabesques freely online at www.abes.fr/abes/

News about members’ library consortia

Azerbaijan Azlic, the Azerbaijan Library Information Consortium, has presented its activities and eIFL.net projects to representatives of regional public libraries with the support of the US Embassy funded Regional Library Development Project on 30 June 2007.

Cameroon COCUREL, the national library consortium, will have an exhibitor stand in the upcoming Campus 2007 in Yaoundè on July 24-28. Campus 2007 (www.saloncampus.org) is an international forum which brings together universities to discuss the opportunities offered for higher education in Cameroon. COCUREL will carry out promotion and marketing activities and encourage enhanced membership in the consortium.

Ghana From these pages we would like to send our warmest congratulations to Helena Asamoah Hassan, eIFL country coordinator, chair of CARLIGH, the national library consortium, and chair of IFLA’s Africa Regional Section, on her election to the Governing Board of IFLA. She will begin her two-year term (2007-2009) during the IFLA conference in Durban this August.

Helena is the University Librarian, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology KNUST Library, KUMASI, Ghana. The eIFL team would like to thank Helena in particular for her cooperation to support eIFL library consortia in the region through visits and workshops.

Lithuania We would also like to congratulate Emilija Banionyte, member of the eIFL.net Advisory Board and president of LMBA, the national library consortium, on her appointment as a member of the IFLA CLM Committee for the four-year term of office (2007-2011) by the IFLA Governing Board.

On another front, she will participate in the LIBER 36th Annual Conference (liber2007.buw.uw.edu.pl) in Warsaw on July 3-6 with the paper "The Daily Practice of a National Research Library Association – the View from the Small Country in the East: Lithuanian Research Library Consortium".

Malawi The local library consortium MALICO has incubated the development of MAREN (http://www.malico.mw/maren/), the Malawi Research and Education Network which is being formally launched in Blantyre on July 11th 2007. One of the early successes has been the granting of 2 strands of the electricity company's fibre for academic networking for three years, and (after much lobbying) an International Gateway License from the Regulator so that the academic network can cross international borders to neighbouring countries.

It is hoped that there will be a great deal of collaboration between MALICO and MAREN as the two organisations go on separate paths. Margaret Ngwira, former eIFL country coordinator for Malawi, is a Director of UbuntuNet Alliance (www.ubuntunet.net), the umbrella organisation for African NRENs and hosts the Secretariat. Margaret encourages other African eIFL consortia to identify themselves with their embryonic NRENs - apart from Kenya and South African, all are at early stages of development. Some contact details are on the Alliance website. As Library Consortia we have the e-content, the knowledge of digital repository creation, and other elements that complement the NREN efforts and might be done in isolation if the presence of local library consortia is not felt!

Nigeria Prof. Doris Bozimo, eIFL country coordinator, and Monika Segbert recently gave a very well received presentation of the growing range of eIFL programs and services to the Committee of Nigerian University Librarians. NULIB, the Nigerian university library consortium, has come a long way since its inception in 2002, and is poised to expand its menu of services with activities in OA/IR (country coordinator Ezra Shiloba Gbaje) and IP (country coordinator Abdulsalami Rilwanu).

Senegal To end this section, our warmest congratulations to Assane Faye, too! eIFL IP coordinator for Senegal, Assane has also been elected to serve on the IFLA Committee on Copyright and other Legal Matters 2007-2009. He works as a librarian in the new public university Université de Bambey in Senegal and as a member of COBESS board committee, Assane is very active in the national university library consortium. On the IP front, Assane organises many conferences across Senegal to inform his colleagues about copyright in libraries, is a consultant to several professional organizations and is currently involved in a project to modify the national copyright law.

2. Upcoming eIFL Events in July-August 2007:

Rima Kupryte, Monika Segbert and David Fuegi held a needs assessment meeting in Rosora, Italy, on July 3-4.

Melissa Hagemann will be attending the PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference in Vancouver on July 11-13. Information on the conference can be viewed at pkp.sfu.ca/

On July 16-19 Susan Veldsman on behalf of eIFL in cooperation with the Carnegie Research Library Consortium will hold this workshop which will provide a general overview of IR matters and a particular focus on accomplishments in South Africa. Program is available on our website.

The 14th Advisory Board meeting will be held at the Monastery of the White Friars, Cupramontana, Italy, on July 27-29. Board members and eIFL staff will meet to discuss the work agenda for the coming months and make preparations for the 2007 General Assembly. The Advisory Board meeting will be followed by the eIFL Management Board meeting.

John Rose, who is supervising the implementation of the Greenstone Southern Africa Pilot Project on behalf of eIFL, will deliver a related paper at the IFLA satellite pre-conference “Managing technologies and library automated systems in developing countries: open source VS commercial options” to be held in Dakar, Senegal, on August 16. Details of the conference are available at www.dakar.aliaco.com/

Bess Sadler, eIFL_FOSS Advisory Board member will also be participating at the same IFLA Technology pre-conference meeting in Dakar with a paper on eIFL FOSS on August 16.

Rima Kupryte, Monika Segbert, Isabel Bernal, Susan Veldsman and Teresa Hackett will participate in the 73rd IFLA Conference in Durban, South Africa, on August 19-23. eIFL will be exhibiting at the stand number 71 and hold meeting with members of the eIFL network, other library and information professionals, and publishing partners.

At IFLA Congress, Teresa Hackett will attend two business meetings of the Committee on Copyright and other Legal Matters (CLM), an IFLA-IFRRO meeting, plus the sessions “What is traditional Knowledge? Who owns it?” and “Debunking Myths About Authors' and Publishers' Collecting Societies - the 'Good, the Bad and the Ugly'” (co-organiser).

3. Update on new Content

Signing of new agreements

An agreement was signed with Oxford University Press for three years to access Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO), a cross-searchable library of over 1,200 Oxford books in the areas of Economics and Finance, Philosophy, Political Science and Religion at highly discounted prices.

eIFL is in the process to sign an agreement with Britannica Online. Countries have been requested to forward their details for access.

CSIRO is also in the process to sign an agreement with eIFL

New negotiations

Nature, Project Muse, Science Online and American Psychological Association are next on our list. More details will be communicated through the coordinators list otherwise get in touch with Susan Veldsman.

Report back on General Assembly

Current and new publishers have been invited to the General Assembly in Belgrade, Serbia. The publishers have responded very positive to this event, and we are looking forward to welcoming almost all of our current publishing partners there: Emerald, Oxford, Cambridge, Gale, Sage, AMP (will represent 5 publishers), EBSCO, IoP, Wiley and Elsevier!

This year General Assembly will also welcome new publishers with whom eIFL is finalizing deals. Britannica Online, Nature, IBSS will find this major event a great opportunity to promote their material amongst eIFL membership, meet eIFL country coordinators face to face and be exposed to their questions, priorities and interest as regards the new e-resources available.

More usage statistics available on the web

SAGE usage stats corresponding to full text downloads in the year 2006 have been uploaded in the MEMBERS ONLY section of our website and data corresponding to 2007 usage will be soon available, too. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Palestine, Serbia and Slovenia are the eIFL countries that are already enjoying SAGE e-resources. Usage stats relative to the free trials by Bulgaria can be found in the same section.

4. Update on eIFL-IP

A turning point for WIPO?

In June 2007, we may have witnessed a turning point for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Running back-to-back over two weeks in Geneva, negotiations took place on a development agenda for WIPO and an international treaty for the protection of broadcast organisations. Both outcomes are positive for challengers of the “IP maximalist” culture which has dominated international policy making for more than a decade.

The first week concluded two-year discussions on a development agenda for WIPO. Working late into Friday night, WIPO member states agreed on forty-five recommendations for action, to establish a permanent Committee on Development and IP as well as a work programme for implementation. Once adopted by the General Assembly in September 2007, the path is set for a “change of conversation” at WIPO. All the issues that libraries care about are there: access to knowledge, exceptions and limitations, the public domain. Although some important proposals were dropped and others were watered down, the result is much more than we could have hoped for at the start of the process.

The death knell was sounded in the second week for the marathon nine-year negotiation for a broadcast treaty. There have been many twists and turns along the way: webcasting first in then out, the late awakening of industry to the implications for innovation and development, shifting government positions. In a joint statement co-authored by eIFL.net, ten NGOs from across the world called for a rejection of the treaty: “After more than nine years of discussions, efforts to find a treaty formulation that deals with piracy of broadcast signals, but which does not harm copyright owners and the legitimate users of broadcasts have failed.” Despite two special sessions in 2007, governments remained far apart on basic issues such as the objectives, scope and application of the treaty. Plans for a diplomatic conference (the final stages of a treaty negotiation) have been shelved and the topic will return to the regular meetings of the copyright committee.

Both negotiations dovetailed as the momentum for a development agenda increased, issues of access to knowledge came to the fore and governments began to ask questions about the rationale for the treaty and the implications of introducing a new economic right for a single interest group, the commercial broadcasters. Have we witnessed a turning point for WIPO? Only time will tell! eIFL.net will be there to provide expertise and support and to make constructive contributions to the new debates.

Text of the development agenda agreement - lists.essential.org/pipermail/a2k/

Analysis of the development agenda agreement by Third World Network - lists.essential.org/pipermail/a2k/

Draft conclusions of the Second Special Session of the SCCR on the broadcast treaty, Geneva, June 18 to 22, 2007 - lists.essential.org/pipermail/a2k/

Collection of NGO statements, analysis and news reports on both topics - lists.essential.org/pipermail/a2k/

Authors’ and publishers’ collecting societies at IFLA Durban. Ask your questions now!

"My library pays a lot of money to the collecting society. How can I be sure where it goes?" "How is the money distributed?" "Can I negotiate the price?" “Can I negotiate the licence terms?”

eIFL-IP is co-organising a session of the Committee on Legal and other Matters on authors’ and publishers’ collecting societies. Reproduction rights organisations (RROs), as they are known, typically license photocopying for books, journals and other material. Libraries are amongst the biggest customers of RROs. Our great line-up of speakers includes the President of IFRRO, the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations, and case studies from eIFL.net member, the Malawi Library and Information Consortium (MALICO), Australia and the UK.

We want to hear about your concerns and experiences dealing with authors’ and publishers’ collecting societies. Please send your questions to by 27 July or hand them to the IFLA Secretariat Office in Durban by 17.00 on 20 August. Please include your name, e-mail address, type of library, your country and whether you will attend the session (if you will attend please also supply your mobile/cell phone no. in international format). We will coordinate and consolidate the questions and we may ask you to present the question.

“Debunking Myths About Authors' and Publishers' Collecting Societies - the 'Good, the Bad and the Ugly'” (co-organiser)
CLM Session no. 153 Thursday, 23 August 10.45-12.45

Make sure to come along to what promises to be a lively session!

Available in Polish: eIFL-IP Handbook on Copyright and Related Issues for Libraries

eIFL-IP Rzecznictwo w sprawie dostepu do wiedzy: prawo autorskie a biblioteki.

We are very pleased that the Polish version of the eIFL-IP Handbook on Copyright and Related Issues is available. Not only has the text been translated into Polish, but the legal situation in Poland for each topic has been added. This makes it a particularly valuable resource for librarians in Poland. Thank you to Jan Andrzej Nikisch, country coordinator from the Poznan Foundation of Scientific Libraries for supporting the work and Barbara Szczepanska for the excellent work in the translation and adaptation to the Polish legal situation.

We welcome other translations. If you are interested, please contact us.

Available in html and pdf at www.eifl.net

Resources

Scenarios for the future. How might IP regimes evolve by 2025? What global legitimacy might such regimes have?

Over the last two years the European Patent Office, a bastion of IP, interviewed around 150 key players - including critics - from the fields of science, business, politics, ethics, economics and law, for their opinions on how the intellectual property system might evolve over the coming years. Four scenarios were developed which although focusing on patents, feature the A2K movement, libraries, open access and open source software in a readable, interesting compendium. www.epo.org

5. Open Access News and Useful Resources

Open Access Workshop in Ghana

An Open Access and Institutional repository workshop was held on the 12-13 June 2007, University of Ghana, Accra. The workshop was presented by the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana (CARLIGH), under the leadership of Helena Asamoah-Hassan, eIFL country coordinator. Susan Veldsman and her team conducted the workshop. All together 15 Institutions, with 24 participants attended. The participants were mainly librarians, head of libraries, system managers and two lecturers from the Departments of Journalism in Ghana. One participant from Nigeria, Ezra Gbaje, was invited to experience the workshop, to begin planning an OA/IR workshop in Nigeria.

Feedback from the group was that they were very impressed with the level of presentations, the issues dealt with and what they learned. Everybody thought they knew what IR’s was about, but they did confess afterwards that the workshop made them realized that there were more to IR’s than just installing the software. They acknowledged the importance of issues e.g. advocacy in an institution, Copyright, standards in IR’s and the difference in the different software.

Charl Roberts, who presented and demonstrated the technical side of IR’s, prepared a CD for each institution, with all the necessary different IR and operating software and step-by-step instructions for installation. This proved to be very valuable for all the institutions, and very positive comments and appreciation were expressed by them.

In general the group will go back and report to their immediate management who nominated them for participation, and also make a presentation to their Library Committee.

Open Access Conference in Hong Kong

eIFL co-organized an Open Access Conference in Hong Kong with the University of Hong Kong on 17-18 May. Speakers included Heather Joseph of SPARC, Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust, Leslie Chan of Bioline International, Colin Steele of Australia National Library, Diana Chan from the City University of Hong Kong, Roland Chin of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, Melissa Hagemann, and Prof. Xiaolin Zhang of the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Over 80 participants from the eight universities in Hong Kong attended. There was strong support from the participants to adopt mandates for deposit of material in their universities’ repositories. In addition, Prof. Zhang’s presentation was quite interesting, as he provided a great overview of the obstacles he has faced in trying to promote OA within the Academy over the past two years since our conference there in 2005 and the strategies he has devised to overcome these problems. The full conference program as well as links to the presentations are available at lib.hku.hk

eIFL IR Workshop in partnership with the Carnegie Research Library Consortium

During 2006, three major university libraries in South Africa (University of Cape Town, University of Kwa Zulu-Natal and University of Witwatersrand) received a Carnegie Grant over a three year period. These grantees have named themselves the Carnegie Research Library Consortium. One of the outcomes of this grant will be, that in each institution, interoperable institutional repositories should have been set up. A workshop will be held on the 16-19 July, where all the relevant issues of IR’s will be discussed. The challenging outcome of this workshop will be to set up a workplan, with a list of activities and responsibilities over a three year period, in order to comply with the grant.

eIFL Harvests metadata of member countries

eIFL is in the process, with the assistance of DARE, to harvest the metadata of 59 existing institutional repositories in the members countries. Herewith eIFL tries to determine the value, possibility, problems and viability of harvesting metadata. We hope that the data will be available in July for evaluation. This repository will represent a collation of developing country repositories, a first internationally!

6. eIFL-FOSS Programme

eIFL FOSS at IFLA technology satellite pre-conference

eIFL FOSS will be present in the IFLA satellite pre-conference “Managing technologies and library automated system in developing countries: open source VS commercial options” to be held in Dakar on August 14-16 with two papers. On the one hand, John Rose will present his paper “A Pilot Project on Digital Library Support and Development in Africa” where he will provide an update on the Greenstone Southern Africa Project which eIFL is monitoring whereas Bess Sadler will deliver the paper co-authored with Tigran Zargaryan “Evaluating open source integrated library systems: “Library-in-a-box” and business readiness rating” to present a key part of the eIFL FOSS programme. Dorothy Eneya from Malawi and member of the eIFL FOSS board will give the paper “A long walk to automation: experiences and challenges of the University of Malawi libraries”. The full programme can be viewed at www.dakar.aliaco.com

The eIFL Team
Please come to visit us during IFLA at stant No. 71!
Member Countries
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