Monthly Archives: April 2017

Jim Neal comments about leadership and R&D

Academic and research libraries are expanding their leadership in research and development activities. R&D is about new knowledge creation and progressive results.  A successful R&D agenda should build on individual interests, organizational priorities, professional importance, and national need.  A R&D enterprise in the library creates a laboratory for experimentation.  It is a magnet for new staff with new skills and capabilities.

It is a venue for collaboration with faculty and with the private sector.  It helps to address process, information, and technology problems.  A R&D enterprise in the library opens opportunities for capitalization and technology transfer, and for foundation and government funding.  It expands library credibility and visibility.  It supports decision making. It creates a more entrepreneurial and risk taking culture in the library.

R&D contributes to library innovation:  applying new knowledge to new resources to produce new goods or new services (Market), the lowering of costs so as to increase the benefits (Value), and forcing us to think deliberately about challenges and unmet needs (Solutions).  R&D is about organizational transformation: changing in composition and structure, that is what we are and what we do; changing the outward form or appearance, that is how we are viewed and understood; and changing in character of condition, that is how we do it.

 

ARL Standing Committee elections – tenth candidate

Tenth candidate statement: Silvia Stasselová. IFLA Standing Committee elections are currently underway, and the ARL Standing Committee is excited to be welcoming new members. We have invited our candidates to submit short biographies so that those of you who are voting members will have some background in making your selections.

Dear colleagues,

I am interested to become an active member of IFLA Academic and Research Libraries Section, as I became the Director General of the University Library in Bratislava, the oldest research library in Slovak Republic since 1st October 2015.  Short time after my inauguration the United Nations Secretary General, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon visited the University Library in Bratislava: https://www.ulib.sk/files/Aktuality/un-secretary-general_uni-lib_svk_2015.pdf

Photos from UN Secretary general visit:  https://www.ulib.sk/sk/spravy/archiv/generalny-tajomnik-osn-vcera-navstivil-ukb.html

I find it very important to become a part of IFLA international academic and libraries network and I would like to support their international cooperation worldwide. I am ready to offer our attractive facilities for organizing IFLA ARLS section standing committee meeting, workshop or other events.

University Library in Bratislava will host will host the Electronic Books On Demand (EOD) Consortium meeting in May 201 and our library will also host the IFLA WIL SIG Satellite conference in August 2017.

Currently I am an active member of IFLA Management of Library Associations since 2007 and I served at the position IFLA MLAS Secretary, elected for this position twice (2009 – 2011, 2011 – 2013). I have translated more than 40 IFLA guidelines and manifestos to Slovak language to help librarians in Slovakia who are not fluent in English.

I am ready to share my knowledge and international experience at Standing Committe of IFLA Academic and Research Libraries Section.

Best wishes from Bratislava and I am looking forward to our cooperation!

Silvia Stasselová
Director General
University Library in Bratislava
President
Slovak Librarians and Libraries Association

 

Additional information by Leo Ma – candidate for ARL Standing Committee

Leo F. H. Ma is currently Head of Upper Campus Libraries at The Chinese University of Hong Kong including both the New Asia College Ch’ien Mu Library and the United College Wu Chung Multimedia Library. Prior to his current position, he served as Head of the Serials and Electronic Resources Department (2001-2006) and Head of the New Asia College Ch’ien Mu Library (2006-2014) of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Library. Apart from managing these two libraries, he spearheads various digitization projects and initiatives including Joint University Libraries Video-on-Demand Project on Radio Television of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Visual Arts Archive, New Asia College Collection Digitization Project, Hong Kong Literature Database, Modern Chinese Literature Research Portal, etc.

Internationally, he was a member of the INSPEC Asia Pacific Library Advisory Committee (2004-2006), the International Customer Advisory Board of Swet (2006-2012), the IEEE Library Advisory Council (2012-2013), and has been serving as a member of the IFLA Standing Committee of Academic & Research Libraries Section as well as the Hong Kong Ambassador of International Librarians Network since 2013. Locally, he served as a Council Member and the Training and Education Officer of the Hong Kong Library Association in 2007-2009. He is currently Fellow of the Hong Kong Library Association, and a member of the Advisory Board for BSc[IM] and MSc[LIM] Programmes of the Faculty of Education of The University of Hong Kong, the Academic Committee of the library programs of the School of Professional and Continuing Education of The University of Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong Literature Research Center Management Committee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

He writes actively on library & information science and literary studies. In the past ten years, he authored and edited more than 15 monographs, and presented more than 50 papers in international, regional and local conferences. He has served as Associate Editor of Journal of Technologies and Human Usability, Ubiquitous Learning: An International JournalThe International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society, and Electronic Journal of e-Learning.

Further information at https://blogs.ifla.org/arl/2017/03/30/arl-standing-committee-elections-second-candidate-statement/ 

ARL Standing Committee elections – ninth candidate statement

Ninth candidate statement: Xin Li. IFLA Standing Committee elections are currently underway, and the ARL Standing Committee is excited to be welcoming new members. We have invited our candidates to submit short biographies so that those of you who are voting members will have some background in making your selections.

It is a great privilege to be nominated as a candidate. I’m interested in serving on IFLA-ARL because of IFLA’s mission. I have been working at U.S. research libraries for close to 25 years. I am a passionate believer in partnerships. I form and lead collaboration initiatives that benefit users and libraries. Allow me to mention three recent examples:

Sharing skills and preserving collections: Cornell Library has a long history in training librarians in other countries, such as Laos, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Java, and Cambodia, in collection preservation. We continue this tradition of sharing knowledge. From 2012-2016, I was the co-PI for a Preservation Internship Program. With generous support from the Henry Luce Foundation, this training program graduated 16 librarians from 12 research libraries in China and Taiwan. After their return, Cornell sent two staff and held, with the graduated interns, an in-country train-the-trainer workshop in Beijing which graduated 40 more librarians from across China. Two more in-country workshops will take place in 2017 and 2018. This program established skills in libraries where they were lacking, enabling these libraries to have local experts to preserve their collections and prolong their availability to scholars around the world. This model can be adopted for collaborations in other library operations and in other regions of the world, especially in developing countries.

Building tools and collaboration opportunities: I lead Cornell’s participation in a ten-library partnership with OCLC. The goal was to collaboratively create solutions to utilize people resources who know the languages but are not trained in cataloging to make non-Roman library collections findable for researchers around the world. The result was the Bit It tool that OCLC now makes available (see https://www.oclc.org/developer/news/2016/bibit-a-simple-cataloging-application.en.html .) This tool can be used by U.S. and non-U.S. librarians, students, and other personnel to generate bibliographic records for collections. Some librarians in Vietnam are investigating this tool. It may also provide publishers and vendors in non-Western countries new business opportunities in record creation.

Access to knowledge for all: Among many Cornell initiatives, two are especially unique and impactful. TEEAL stands for The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library (http://www.teeal.org/ ), a database where researchers, students, faculty and librarians in low-income countries can discover and access thousands of current research without the use of the Internet. arXiv.org (https://arxiv.org/ ) is a pre-print reposition that is open and free to any individual user in the world. I have been actively promoting these two resources to librarians in East Asia and Southeast Asia. It is critically important that researchers in developing countries have access to the most current literature so their work can keep current.

I believe in IFLA’s global vision, “Together, we create the future.” I am very interested in applying my experience and skills to advance IFLA-ARL.

Please see my experience and credentials at https://www.linkedin.com/in/xin-li-756277 .

My most recent publications are:

My most recent presentations are:

  • Li, X. (2016) Digital Humanities: Working between Control and Coordination. Presented at the Future of Academic Libraries in the United States and China, co-sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Library and the Peking University Library.
  • Li, X. (2016) Library as the Laboratory for Humanists. Presented at the Tsinghua Symposium co-sponsored by the Tsinghua School of Humanities and Tsinghua University Library, China.
  • Li, X. (2015) Users and use. Opening presentation at the 2016 Ivy-Plus East Asian Library Meeting hosted at the Cornell University.
  • Li, X. (2015) Cornell University Library’s models of partnership and future directions. Invited speaker to the Wuhan University and Xiamen University Libraries, as well as the Shanghai Public Library, China.

ARL Standing Committee elections – eighth candidate

Eighth candidate statement: Ursula Arning.  IFLA Standing Committee elections are currently underway, and the ARL Standing Committee is excited to be welcoming new members.  We have invited our candidates to submit short biographies so that those of you who are voting members will have some background in making your selections.

I am a librarian at ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences, the largest academic and research library for Life Sciences in Germany. I am interested in academic libraries and knowledge exchange and I would be delighted to share our own experience with librarians from all over the world.

I am an expert in the field of Open Access and Open Data. I think these are the future directions for libraries and I believe that it is necessary to work together to create new opportunities in the academic publishing area. For this reason, we have created the Open Access Publishing Portal www.publisso.de, with platforms in the green and the golden road, and, most importantly, a full advisory service which can answer all questions about Open Access. This service aims to help scientists decide on their publishing modalities and to show them how and where they have the opportunity to publish their (working) papers. The service also aims to help other librarians communicate with scientists from their own institutions and give them some material in the hand. As a result we have created video tutorials about DOIs or how to share data and we organize workshops about Open Access and data management.

As I was a librarian at the Goethe-Institute in Córdoba/Argentina before, I am fully aware of the importance and the enrichment of cooperation all over the world. Consequently I look forward to working in the IFLA context and to work with you in this field of scientific libraries.

I studied Library Science at HDM Stuttgart and then Latin-American literature at the university Bielefeld. My PHD deals with literature during the Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976-1983).

My publications in the field of Open Access are mostly in German, but I will be glad to write my next papers in English or Spanish for the IFLA.

Articles:

Ursula Arning, Birte Lindstädt, Jasmin Schmitz: PUBLISSO: Das Open-Access-Publikationsportal für die Lebenswissenschaften. In: GMS Med Bibl Inf 2016; 16(3)

Ursula Arning: Open-Access-Publizieren und -Beraten: Mit Fokus auf die PUBLISSO – Publikationsplattform von ZB MED. In: Bibliothek Forschung und Praxis Bd. 40, Heft 3 (Dez 2016)

Ursula Arning: Das PUBLISSO-Fachrepositorium. Ein Ort für Open-Access- und Open-Data-Publikationen aus den Lebenswissenschaften. In: Strategien für die Bibliothek als Ort – Festschrift für Petra Hauke zum 70. Geburtstag,  de Gruyter 2016, S. 369-378

Ursula Arning: GMS publishes your research findings – and makes the related research data available through Dryad. In: GMS Z Med Ausbild 2015; 32(3)

Ursula Arning: Der Wissenschaftskreislauf schließt sich: Publizieren bei einer Spezialbibliothek – ZB MED – Leibniz-Informationszentrum Lebenswissenschaften. In: o-bib – das offene Bibliotheksjournal, Bd. 2, Nr. 4, 2015

Ursula Arning: Open Access-Publizieren im Bereich Lebenswissenschaften. In: Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) – Proceedings, Series of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI), Volume P-238, S. 17-20, Informatik in der Land-, Forst- und Ernährungswirtschaft, Referate der 35. GIL Jahrestagung, 23.-24. Februar 2015 in Geisenheim

Ursula Arning: Living Handbooks – Wissenschaftliche Handbücher online publizieren. In: ZBIW Jahresbericht 2014, S. 40-41

Ursula Arning, Jasmin Schmitz: Publizieren: Ein Überblick. In: Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB) (Hrsg): CoScience – gemeinsam forschen und publizieren mit dem Netz, 2014

 

 

ARL Standing Committee elections – seventh candidate

Seventh candidate statement: Dr Ramesh C Gaur

IFLA Standing Committee elections are currently underway, and the ARL Standing Committee is excited to be welcoming new members.  We have invited our candidates to submit short biographies so that those of you who are voting members will have some background in making your selections.

 

Currently I am the University Librarian, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi India since 2011. My past assignments include Ministry of Culture(IGNCA), Tata Institute of Fundamental Research(TIFR), CRRI-CSIR, Management Development Institute(MDI), IMT Ghaziabad etc. I am a Fulbright Scholar(VT, USA), and  have visited USA, UK, Australia, Russia, Germany, France, China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong and the Netherlands in relation to various assignments related to Digital Library and allied areas.  Honours & Awards: IASLIC- S M Ganguly Best Librarian award for year 2007 ; Satkal Young Librarian award for year 2009 , SRFLIS India Professional Excellence Award 2013 and Professional Excellence Award 2015 by ADR Publications’.

I am member of IFLA since 2004. Currently I am Member of IFLA Regional Standing Committee on Asia Oceania (RSCAO) and had served IFLA Standing Committee on Art Libraries Section for period 2010-2014. I have also organized IFLA Newspaper section conference 2010 and Mid-Term Meeting of RSCAO 2017.  I am the Member of Think Tank on Library and Information Services formed by Ministry of Culture, Government of India to advise Government on Library policy matters. I am the member of many important national and international professional bodies. Important affiliations includes; Member-International Consultative Committee on Digital Dunhuang, China, NDLTD Board of Directors, Member of UGC National Committee for Implementation of Submission and Access to Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Universities in India, Member-National Advisory Board-E-Shodh Sindhu National Consortia, Member Databib Advisory Board, USA. Academic Advisory Board of many major publishers; Elsevier, Springer, Royal Society of Chemistry, EBSCO, PROQUEST, OUP, CUP ,etc.. Member of Library Advisory Board / Committees of various Universities in India .

I am the Member of Editorial /Advisory Board / Guest Editor in several International and National Journals. In over 25 year’s professional career, I have authored and edited 6 books, have published over 65+ articles /papers and have presented / delivered over 300 papers / talks in various national and international conferences etc . Have organized and directed number of national and International conference.

Having associated with one of the most reputed University in India, I wish to serve IFLA-ARL to work for Academic and Research Libraries. With my experience and exposures in international library filed, I may be helping other colleagues in understanding the changing role of Academic  libraries and librarians.