No. 30 - November/December 2007

1. eIFL-related News

eIFL Advisory Board meeting

As is tradition, the advisory board met before and also briefly after the GA. The minutes of the meetings will be available in 1 weeks time in members’ only section for everyone to read. The Board expressed very sincere thanks to the outgoing members, Dr. Buhle Mbambo_Thata Zimbabwe/South Africa) and Irakli Garibashvili (Georgia) for their deep commitment and numerous valuable contributions, and extended a warm welcome to the newly elected members, Dr. Helena Assamoah-Hassan from Ghana and Dr. Irina Razumova from Russia.

Perhaps most important for all members to know is that the board agreed to start a visioning process of ‘eIFL.net 5 years from now’, to make sure we continue to be on the leading edge of meeting members’ needs making best use of new tools and developments. Of course we will keep everyone closely posted on this process, and indeed hope for input from all our members. An outline of facilitator and process will be communicated to all members soon.

eIFL General Assembly

Are you all wearing your hats, just to manifest the eIFL family feeling?? Isn’t it good to ‘chaperoned’ by the eIFL communityJ Pictures of the eIFL hatters will soon go up on the website, but for now we would like to thank everyone for their really great contributions. This GA was remarkable in that WE ALL made it so rich and interesting – the presentations from many countries of experiences and success, what we have learnt and can share, the case studies of individual solutions in all eIFL program areas, the impressive evidence of impact of eIFL.net consortia services and activities. An outstanding feature this year was the wide range and depth of successful advocacy activities we are all collectively undertaking in all program areas, and the great results this is achieving, at the country and international level. Congratulations to everyone on taking time out from busy jobs to present and share your learning and knowledge in the GA, anf for engaging fully in the many round-table discussions. It was fun, and good. All presentations are up on the website, if you want to revisit.

News about members’ library consortia

Bulgaria 6th of December Bulgarian Information Consortium (BIC) will hold its Annual Meeting. Nadya Terzieva will give an overview of "Bulgarian Information Consortium – Five Years Together". Congratulations with your 5 years anniversary.

Macedonia MEL with FOSIM will organize in mid November presentations on: eIFL.NET - MEL: What are and how to access and search: EBSCO, CUP, OUP and SAGE. Six presentations will be held: three in Skopje, one each at Bitola, Stip and Tetovo. In total 8 institutions will be covered.

Moldova 1. A presentation of the Initiative for Digital Library,organized by the US Assembly and Muskie Program IREX in the Academy of Economic Studies, Scientific Library took place on November the 13th . followed by a round table with Consortium eIFL Direct members about the integration of the Moldova Libraries in the information resources globalization process.

2. A Scientific Conference at the Technical University (active member of the consortium eIFL Direct Moldova): Technology Quality Ensuring – Main Concernment of the Library Management took place on November 16th. The Consortium Secretary Natalia Cheradi held a communication on «Techno-Informational Assurance of the electronic Libraries in the research and education system».

Ukraine December 18, 2007, Kyiv: Authors rights in the digital environment. A seminar organised by International Renaissance Foundation, Informatio-Consortium, Scientific Library of the National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. We plan to discuss model license agreements for Open Access institutional repositories, Ukrainian legislation on authors rights and open content electronic resources, bringing Creative Commons licenses to Ukraine, and the experience of developing Open Access institutional repositories in Ukrainian Universities.

2. Upcoming eIFL events in November/December 2007:

7 of November we had the eIFL Advisory Board meeting in Belgrade,Serbia

8-10 November we had eIFL annual General Asembly in Belgrade, Serbia

13 of November Teresa Hackett attended annual MacArthur Foundation grantee meeting in Washington DC, USA

On November 20-21 November, Susan Veldsman will do a presentation and attend the South African Regional Universities Association (SARUA) Open Access leadership summit in association with the AAKA.This is part of a longer-term ICT and Open Access Programme for SARUA, including an advocacy and action programme with VCs, Deans of Research, Ministers of Education, librarians, researchers, and others.

24-25 of November Monika Segbert and Rima Kupryte will take part in an eIFL workshop in Khartoum, Sudan

26-27 of November Monika Segbert will take part in an eIFL workshop in Ethiopia and visit libraries in Addis Abeba. This workshop, to explore the interest of the Ethiopian community to join eIFL, has been made possible with the collaboration of the ecbp- engineering capacity building program (IT - Based Libraries) of the German Development Cooperation

26-29 November national Malawi workshop on Greenstone to be organised at the Bunda College of Agriculture

29 November-1 December, Randy Metcalfe from eIFL-FOSS will participate in the Open Translation Tools 2007 meeting in Zagreb, Croatia aspirationtech.org. Co-organized by Aspiration and Multimedia Institute - [MI2], this event brings together those creating open source translation tools with those in need of better tools to support translation of open content.

3-5 December national Zimbabwe workshop on Greenstone to be organsied at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Bulawayo.

4-5 December two resource people from the University of Glasgow will deliver a workshop on Institutional Repositories in Syria, organsied by eIFL.net as part of the EU Tempus funded project.

3. Update on new Content

New agreements

eIFL has signed agreements with Britannica Online which will allow access to encyclopedic content, world atlas, biographies and additional full text journals. eIFL also signed an offer with Multi Science which gives access 13 full text journals to multi aspects within engineering e.g. architecture, sound, space and aeronautics.

Agreements are also close to being reached with Project Muse, Nature Publishing Group and Royal Society.

An interesting offer from OVID has been received at a highly reduced priced, for access to over 13 million bibliographic records in IBSS, ISD, ERIC, Agris, Agricola, and Medline.

Extensions of agreements

A variation agreement has been signed with Integrum Techno for the period 2007-2008.

AMP, Institute of Physics, and Oxford Journals are currently in the final stages of negotiation and to be signed before the end of November, for renewal from 2008-2010.

Ongoing negotiations

We will continue to work American Psychological Association and Science to see if we can reach any agreement this year.

eIFL has just entered in some negotiations with Web of Science on behalf of Armenia and Georgia.

Susan Veldsman attended Frankfurt Book Fair to meet up with publishers and discuss pricing offers and renewal details.

4. Update on eIFL-IP

WIPO: approval of the Development Agenda

In October, WIPO Member States had adopted the set of 45 recommendations for action for a Development Agenda for WIPO, the result of three years hard negotiationscovering six clusters of activities: Technical Assistance and Capacity Building; Norm-setting, Flexibilities, Public Policy and Public Knowledge; Technology Transfer, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Access to Knowledge; Assessments, Evaluation and Impact Studies; Institutional Matters including Mandate and Governance; and Other Issues. Member states also agreed to establish a Committee on Development and Intellectual Property, to meet in the first half of 2008, to agree a work programme and to monitor and report on the implementation of all recommendations.

The General Assemblies also accepted that, after nine years of discussion, there is insufficient agreement to proceed to the final stage of a treaty for the protection of broadcasting organisations, although the topic will remain on the agenda of the copyright committee.

Outcomes welcomed by eIFL

eIFL welcomes both of these outcomes. We have attended every negotiation of the Development Agenda, made dozens of interventions and have met with scores of government delegates. We are pleased that access to knowledge, the public domain and other public policy considerations made it into the final package. We joined with other NGOs to oppose the broadcast treaty because we believe that a new exclusive right for broadcasters would harm both the creative communities and the public, whilst signal theft is already adequately dealt under existing laws and treaties.

With the Development Agenda now in place, we want to build on the positive outcomes at WIPO.

Member States Adopt a Development Agenda for WIPO www.wipo.int

WIPO Assemblies Conclude www.wipo.int

News from eIFL-IP – copyright conference, distance course and new faces!

eIFL-IP is pleased to announce two exciting new developments.

In 2008 and 2009 we will hold a conference for eIFL-IP librarians covering key IP policy, legal and advocacy issues, building on existing knowledge and experience and providing support on specific issues. This is the first time that everyone will meet, as the previous training was held in three regions (Kampala, Kiev and Tallinn). We are currently working out the budget and location. We will soon be consulting with eIFL librarians for programme ideas and topics that should be included.

Together with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School in the USA, we will create a brand new distance learning course in copyright for librarians. This is a first and we hope that many more librarians, especially in developing and transition countries, will benefit from training and will become advocates for access to knowledge. We will partner with institutions in eIFL countries to deliver the course and we are already exploring ideas with library schools in Africa.

We welcome two new members to the eIFL-IP team. Margo de Groot will organise the conference (margo.degroot[at]eifl.net) and Melanie Dulong de Rosnay (mdulong[at}cyber.law.harvard.edu) will take the lead on the copyright course. Melanie attended the eIFL General Assembly in Belgrade.

eIFL is most grateful to the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation for enabling us to extend our work.

Collection of copyright laws from eIFL countries

We are also building our collection of copyright laws from eIFL countries. We need to have the laws available in order to give advice on any copyright issues, and to compare and contrast best - and worst! - practices. This will improve our policy advice and our ability to assist eIFL librarians with specific questions.

Margo de Groot is coordinating the work with the kind assistance of eIFL-IP librarians.

Resources

Sisule Musungu’s blog Sisule is a respected writer and commentator on intellectual property, innovation, access to knowledge and international human rights law, and a member of the eIFL-IP Advisory Board. Born in Kenya, Sisule was also educated in South Africa, Uganda and Switzerland and so has a great perspective on current IP issues.

thoughtsincolours.blogspot.com

5. Update on eIFL-OA

Open access and awareness raising

South African Regional Universities Association (SARUA) will be hosting an Open Access leadership summit in association with the AAKA in Botswana, November 20-21, 2007. This is part of a longer-term ICT and Open Access Programme for SARUA, including an advocacy and action programme with VCs, Deans of Research, Ministers of Education, librarians, researchers, and others.

The purpose will be to:

  • Further understanding of the latest developments and challenges in open access.
  • Establish a basis for consensus within the 58 universities of SARUA on what Open Access is and means for HE in the region.
  • Compile a guiding SARUA Regional HE “Charter” or Summit Statement for Open Access.

Susan Veldsman assisted and advised with the compilation of the programme and speakers for the conference. OSI and eIFL are also providing funding for Alma Swan, Leslie Chan and Jasper Lee Maenzanise to participate in this conference. Together with Susan Veldsman, they will be responsible for facilitating a statement/mandate for Open Access at the close of the conference.

Mandate for public access to NIH-funded research poised to become law

The U.S. Senate approved the Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill, including a provision that directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to strengthen its Public Access Policy by requiring rather than requesting participation by researchers. The bill will now be reconciled with the House Appropriations Bill, which contains a similar provision, in another step toward support for public access to publicly funded research becoming United States law.

Under a mandatory policy, NIH-funded researchers will be required to deposit copies of eligible manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine¹s online database, PubMed Central. Articles will be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Negotiators from the House and Senate are expected to meet to reconcile their respective bills this fall. The final, consolidated bill will have to pass the House and the Senate before being delivered to the President at the end of the year.

Portal to Institutional Repositories in eIFL member countries

Over the last year eIFL has been working hard to create a database and record all aspects of Institutional Repositories that have been developed in all our member countries. After regular correspondence and updating with countries, we can now report that 17 member eIFL countries currently have the following repositories:

Total Completed In progress
2006 2007 2006 2007 2006 2007
64 96 39 69 25 27

This gave eIFL the opportunity to look for co-operation the DRIVER project and its follow up DRIVER II (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research:DRIVER). One of the objectives of DRIVER is to organize and build a virtual, European scale network (portal) of existing institutional repositories from the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Belgium.

As a result, eIFL has organized and built a virtual, eIFL member country scale network (portal) of existing institutional repositories from eIFL countries as well as creating national and international layers of repository representation, to stimulate development.

A meeting was held in Utrecht in October with SURF, DRIVER and CQ2 to discuss the way forward with this portal/infrastructure we have created.

During this meeting it was agreed that the objectives of the repository is to provide:

  • infrastructure for countries
  • visibility of scholarly publications in the developing world
  • trans -national co-operation and community building
  • raising the awareness on the importance of standards, adding of full text within repositories and training
  • possible participation and co-operation opportunities in international projects e.g. Driver
  • motivation to countries to set up repositories (encourage competition)

Further decisions:

  • maintain and develop it as a demonstrator, and to give countries the experience and exposure to contribute to an international initiative
  • sign a contract till December 2007 with the IT (CQ2) company to refine and adjust the portal
  • continuously update general data e.g. base URLs, contact people, etc
  • give the portal an eIFL look and feel to it (currently it is on the test site, and resembles nothing of eIFL)!
  • Clean up the metadata, so that we could present it internationally
  • Attach a statistical programme to portal, to monitor usage from across the world

In our discussions with DRIVER it was concluded that eIFL's ultimate goal could be to develop these repositories to an international standard. This will be done by training e.g metadata, standards, linking, setting up repositories. These repositories should be at such a level so that they could easily feed or be included in e.g. DRIVER project.

eIFL is also in the process to "mass register" eIFL repositories in IR registers and harvesters like OAIster and OpenDOAR

Registered OpenDOAR Harverster OAIster
2006 2007 2006 2007
21 38 16 30

6. Update on eIFL-FOSS

A revised proposal for core funding for the eIFL-FOSS program received approval from the Open Society Institute in early October 2007. The eIFL-FOSS program will concentrate on advocacy and engagement. At its heart is a project supporting evaluation of and migration to free and open source (FOSS) integrated library systems (ILS). Working closely with a network of eIFL-FOSS country co-ordinators, the project will conduct a series of pilots in order to identify and draft needed support documentation to enable libraries to evaluate their readiness for and undertake a migration to either the Koha or Evergreen FOSS ILS. This is an opportunity for librarians in eIFL member countries to engage directly with the Koha or Evergreen FOSS development communities and to contribute to that development.

Leading the eIFL-FOSS program is Randy Metcalfe, formerly of OSS Watch (http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/) the UK national FOSS advisory service. Randy is joined by Tigran Zargaryan, Project Co-ordinator, and Bess Sadler, Technical Consultant.

Further information on the eIFL-FOSS program and the eIFL-FOSS ILS project, including links to the eIFL-FOSS blog, is available from www.eifl.net.

Feedback on the Greenstone Southern Africa Pilot Project

The second phase of this one-year project on the development and promotion of digital libraries in Southern Africa is now well underway. The training workshop organised on 1-5 October at the Library of the University of Namibia (UNAM) in Windhoek (the sub-regional centre for the project) was a clear success, providing training in advanced Greenstone and digital library (DL) techniques for 5 participants from the national project centres in Lesotho, Malawi and Zimbabwe and specialists from 8 Namibian information centres. The lectures of two international specialists (Prof. Ian Witten of the Greenstone team University of Waikato, New Zealand, and Repke de Vries of the Netherlands National Library) were complemented by the strong technical expertise of UNAM in digital library development (see greenstone.unam.na) as presented by Renate Morgenstern, the sub-regional project coordinator. A DL and Greenstone user survey questionnaire, as well as a user discussion list, have been put up on the project website ( www.sagreenstone.unam.na) to enable the project to effectively bring together and serve actual and potential Greenstone users in Southern Africa.

The national centres are now in the process of developing their own initial DL applications and organising basic Greenstone courses to support the development of national Greenstone networks in their own countries and in neighbouring countries. The first activity will be the Malawi workshop to be organised at the Bunda College of Agriculture on 26-29 November. The trainees will include 18 Malawians (5 from Bunda College Library, 8 from other University of Malawi Libraries, and 5 from other Malawi information institutions) and one representative each from Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia. The principal lecturer will be Renate Morgenstern, assisted by a member of the DISA (Digital Imaging Project of South Africa) team in Durban and Geoffey Salanje and Misheck Nyaluso of the University of Malawi who participated in the Windhoek workshop. Bunda College is developing within the project a publicly available Malawiana Greenstone collection of digitised documents on Malawi and by Malawians, with joint support from the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP).

The other two national project centres are also well advanced in their workshop plans. The National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, which is also the eIFL national coordination centre, is planning their course on 3-5 December. In addition to about 15 Zimbabwean specialists, it is expected that participants from Botswana and Swaziland will attend. The workshop will be given by Amos Kujenga, Systems Analyst in the NUST Library, and Elisha Chiware, Lecturer in the Department of Information and Communication Studies of UNAM, both of whom were trained in Greenstone in the Windhoek workshop. The Lesotho course, organised by the University of Lesotho Library and the Lesotho College of Education in Maseru during the week of 25 February 2008.

As the national Greenstone networks and applications develop through the pilot project, it is expected that cooperation among specialists, institutions and countries in the DL will intensify, and discussions will begin on how to continue the sub-regional Greenstone and DL support activity after the pilot project terminates in July 2008.

The eIFL Team