GIOPS Newsletter Fall 2021

IFLA GIOPS Newsletter
Volume 1, Edition 1

Cover Image from Wikimedia Commons: Central Library, Portland, Oregon (2012) by Another Believer/Central Library, Portland, Oregon

The incentive to start on this project came from GIOPS members and other government information librarians by taking part in our membership survey in 2020. You voted that a newsletter would be the best option for receiving GIOPS information.

The GIOPS community represents many different library environments, including government libraries, intergovernmental organizations, academic institutions, and public non-governmental organisations. Catering for such a diverse information landscape is a significant challenge for the GIOPS newsletter team.

Our motto for this edition has been "less is more". We begin with one issue of the newsletter in 2021 and will expand next year. More current news will be distributed via social media.

So far, we have decided on a few set features, like "A day in the life …", featuring an interview with a different Government information expert, and the "Officer's Corner" with regular updates from the GIOPS leadership. With your feedback, this newsletter will grow and change. It is meant to provide food for thought and you are invited to make comments and share ideas, experiences, questions, photos, and events from your professional life.

The GIOPS newsletter team wants to encourage you to make this your own newsletter by sharing your contributions with us and the government library community. We are looking forward to hearing from you, no matter in which area of the world you stay.

In the meantime, enjoy reading this first edition and stay tuned!

Best wishes,
Cornelie Butz (IFLA-GIOPS, Chair)

To provide feedback on this newsletter or to submit content for future newsletters, please contact Cornelie Butz at cornelie.butz@bverwg.bund.de

The GIOPS Officers are excited to announce the publication of the IFLA Professional Report entitled The Government Information Landscape and Libraries, edited by Kay Cassell, Jim Church, and Kate Tallman.

This report illustrates the challenges and complexities posed by government publishing systems through a series of case studies from selected countries, regions, and institutions worldwide. These detailed cases provide examples of government publishing practices, depositories, access to information, government libraries, preservation, data, and digitization.

The report can be found on the IFLA GIOPS website here and has quickly become “required reading” for many LIS programs throughout the world. The GIOPS Officers are very grateful to Jim Church for his leadership and hard work on this report.

We hope you had a chance to attend the 2021 IFLA World Library and Information Congress and watch the GIOPS session on “Navigating the Government Information and Official Publications Landscape: Authority, Reproducibility and Accessibility”. We had three great speakers join us!

Navigating through the wealth of European Union information: the power of identifiers by Carol Riccalton, Head of Unit, Library and Preservation Services - Publications Office of the European Union
Freedom of Information Law and Access to Electronic Government Information in Nigeria: A Content Analysis of Government Websites in Nigeria by Ifeanyi Jonas Ezema, University Librarian - Enugu State University of Science and Technology, Enugu Nigeria
Explaining the Low Willingness of Government Data Providers: Using a Grounded Theory Approach Si Li, School of information management, Peking University, Beijing, China

The recordings from this year’s IFLA WLIC are available to registered delegates for one year as a benefit of your registration. Only registered participants can see the recordings. It is still possible to purchase access to the overall platform content - for on-demand viewing until 29 October 2022.

By: Heather Christenson, HathiTrust Program Officer for Collections and Federal Documents; Graham Dethmers, HathiTrust Metadata Analyst; Jessica Belle Rohr, HathiTrust Member Engagement and Communications Specialist

When Libraries Closed: Can HathiTrust Help?

Early in March 2020, as the novel coronavirus 2019 (SARS-CoV-19) led to outbreaks of the COVID-19 illness in the United States, HathiTrust’s Executive Director, Mike Furlough, began receiving inquiries from HathiTrust member libraries as their colleges and universities rapidly started shifting to remote teaching. The question was nearly always the same: what role could HathiTrust play in providing broader access to copyrighted materials during the impending emergency?

The HathiTrust leadership and board had indeed begun discussions on the topic, and it quickly became clear that students and faculty at many HathiTrust member institutions would soon have little or no access to print collections and would need to rely on electronic copies of library resources. With more than a decade preserving and providing access to the largest collection of digitized books managed by and for the academic library community, HathiTrust was uniquely poised to respond to these needs. On the strength of the shared digital collection resulting from mass digitization and its 60+ academic library contributors, combined with an engaged member base and able HathiTrust staff, the Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) came together in less than four weeks.

Our Path to ETAS: Collaboration & Teamwork

While the need was apparent, the precise path to designing and implementing a service in a condensed time frame was less obvious. There were many factors to consider: fair use and copyright law evaluation; risk management; technical requirements for delivering digitized titles; user authorization; end user training and support, among others.

Our host institution, the University of Michigan, helped clear the first steps with their legal and administrative backing for the effort. We then set to work, deferring all other projects and operational tasks to focus on developing the service.

A typical service development project would likely have included distinct, linear stages for requirements gathering, stakeholder engagement, technical and service process development and testing, followed by a pilot release, iterative changes, and communications and training. We aimed to do all of this, simultaneously, in a matter of weeks. Our 12-person staff formed 6 teams to coordinate all aspects of service design and delivery.

Policy Development
Messaging and Communications
Member Support and Service Activation
User Support
Systems and Operations
Overlap Data and Local Discovery

The working definition of what we aimed to deliver was simple: to expand fair use access to our corpus to ensure that the academic communities of our members can continue teaching and learning with HathiTrust resources if physical access to print collections is compromised during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the coming weeks, each team in the temporary organizational structure focused on a specific aspect of ETAS service development. Cross-team work such as this enabled both the backend, technical service development, and the front-end processes to implement the service at a member library and at scale.
The new emergency service would rely on fair use provisions in U.S. copyright law and in provisions outside the U.S. where applicable to provide temporary access to digitized titles in HathiTrust that corresponded to physical titles held by a member library, and in particular, for the duration of an emergency that prevents physical access to the library’s collection.

In addition to the collaboratively-built collection of millions of digital volumes, we already had a number of service and technical components in place that provided a strong foundation for rapid development. For example, a requirement of HathiTrust membership is that member institutions submit a record of their print holdings. These library holdings would now provide the basis for the principle of access based on fair use in the U.S. and similar legal provisions in other countries: one digital copy for every print copy on the member’s shelves. A further pre-existing technical component for membership would be used to adhere to those boundaries: HathiTrust already had a process to validate individual access via established institutional credentials, so we could extend that function to the emergency service.

We announced the forthcoming service to members on March 19 and established a cohort of ten member libraries to help test the implementation and service. By March 31, 2020, we were ready to release the service to the member community.

Launch and Growth of ETAS

During the first 5 days after launch, 7 HathiTrust staff processed requests and activated ETAS for 118 members. Two weeks after launch, 147 members were actively using the service. To date, 204 member institutions have been activated with the service at some point during the COVID-19 emergency. While the service initially was available to only U.S. institutions, we were eventually able to offer it to Candian libraries, as well as several others in the UK and in Lebanon.

Since April 2020, we have recorded 4.1 million checkouts for an average of 9,800 per day. This translates to 248.2 million pages viewed and averages 584,000 pages per day.

We’ve heard regularly on the impact the service has made in the scholarly lives of students, faculty, and researchers, and fellow librarians.

“I just wanted to share my sincere gratitude for the services that HathiTrust has offered during Covid-19. The emergency temporary access has completely changed my ability to do research since March; without it I would not have been able to write anything. Because of this service, I was able to complete two chapters of my dissertation since the onset of these limiting circumstances. I have been able to access both primary and secondary scholarship which has been crucial to my research.”

University of California - Berkeley Ph.D. Candidate

"Our public service librarians reported helping so many students with their research papers using ETAS. It was the closest thing we could muster to bringing the library to them, and certainly enabled better research than would have been possible otherwise."

Southern Methodist University Librarian

Conclusion

The Emergency Temporary Access Service is an outcome of over ten years of collaboration and investment by academic and research libraries, who embraced mass digitization, built the 17.4 million item digital collection in HathiTrust, and who continue their commitment to digital preservation, access, and solving common challenges at scale. While the pandemic was the genesis of ETAS, HathiTrust intends to keep ETAS as a permanent service that can be activated by libraries in the event of future perils such as fires, floods, or other emergencies that threaten not only the pace of research, teaching, and learning, but the lives and communities we serve.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank our colleagues at HathiTrust, as well as others at partner institutions including the California Digital Library; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and the University of Indiana for supporting the HathiTrust Digital Library upon which the Emergency Temporary Access Service is based. We would also like to thank the more than 60 HathiTrust member libraries that since 2008 have contributed content to the digital library.

About HathiTrust

HathiTrust (www.hathitrust.org) is a not-for-profit collaborative of 200+ academic and research libraries, preserving 17.4+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust stewards this collection under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests.

HathiTrust holds the largest set of digitized books managed by the academic, research, and library community.

European Commission Library Reading Room

Interview by Kay A. Cassell

What is the history of this library?
The Library was established in 1958 and for a long time was known as the Central Library. Initially it served the European Economic Community, Euratom and the European Coal and Steel Community. In 1968 when these organizations merged, it became the Central Library of the European Commission. More recently its name changed to Library and e-resources. On 1st January 2021 the Library was moved to the Publications Office of the EU, the official publishing arm of the EU institutions, agencies and bodies. Its name is now simply EC Library. Its focus is on providing a service to the staff of the European Commission (EC)

Until January I had been head of a unit in the Publications Office that provided a range of services covering cataloguing, identifying, acquiring or preserving EU publications. This move to add the Library to the Publications Office was a very logical move and the Library fits well into the unit I headed. It uses my training as a librarian. The Publications Office has experts in metadata, long term preservation, linked data and the semantic web as well as contract management, licenses, copyright and promotional activities. The Library can benefit from the knowledge of Publications Office staff, and the Publications Office will benefit from the library. With a limited budget it is important to pool resources and help others by offering common services.

Tell me what a day is like at your library.
I have been the head of the EC Library since January 2021 so I started in the middle of the pandemic which means this is not the normal way the libraries function. The EC Library in the European Commission of the EU (European Union) has two sites - one in Brussels and one in Luxembourg. About 30 staff are located in the Brussels site and about 10 staff are located in Luxembourg. During the pandemic we have been operating remotely although from time to time we do go and retrieve books from the Library needed by users. Most of the use of the library is online using e-resources – e-books, e-journals and other e-resources. The libraries offer small print collections and access to 80,000 e-books “on demand” and 7,000 e-journals. The collections include EU publications and third party material which will be of interest to our users such as from the e-libraries of the OECD, IMF and the World Bank. We serve the needs of the European Commission officials for their work in policy development and other daily tasks. The Library has an “ Ask a Librarian” service where people can ask where to find a particular title, make a request for the library to purchase a particular title or ask other questions. Requesting a reading list has become very popular. We spend a great deal of time doing these reading lists to make them as complete as possible and to make them unbiased. Some examples of reading lists are: data visualization, Covid-19 and vulnerable workers, AI and data. We intend to start sharing these reading lists with the other institutions as they are time-consuming to produce and so if we can share this work between us, we all benefit. The library is working to support the over 30,000 employees of the commission and is open to researchers, academics and students.

As you return to a more normal service, what are your plans for the libraries?
We plan to begin opening the libraries in the fall. Our services will be both in person as well as online. The Library can provide inter-institutional services as does the Publications Office. The reading rooms are still very important and they will be used for presentations and exhibitions as well as to promote information literacy and, of course, access to the EC Library resources to researchers, students and to staff of other EU institutions. We already offer several training courses such as “Search Like a Pro” but we will add more presentations to help our users become more efficient in their use of the Library. I want to do more that will provide our users with additional information about the library’s collection. I think that many of our potential users do not understand the scope of our e-collections and what we can provide for them. We also publish a newsletter that provides information on resources in the library and current library information trends. Our subscription list has now grown to 600 subscribers.

We need to do even better collection development. We need to look at collections of e-books we receive through our subscriptions and add the titles that are particularly relevant to the EU to the library’s collection. At present we offer Find –eR (Find electronic Resources) and Ebook Central which is a collection of e-books from academic and other top publishers. The Library also offers many databases providing access to periodical articles and data. We are currently setting up an EU legal deposit scheme to ensure that we can capture all the publications produced by the EU institutions and make them available to others in the EU and beyond.

The next important area to consider is access to data. Many of our users and potential users do not realize that we can provide them with data that they need. We can often save both time and money of our users in providing this valuable information. Sometimes EC staff just try to find what they need on their own not thinking that the library could do it better and faster. I want to develop a data acquisition services which in time might enable these resources to be available through all the EU libraries.

I hope we can add a chat service so we can find out more about our users’ needs than we can now. Now we receive requests by email and sometimes the request does not give us the complete information about what the user needs.

I see an important information literacy role for the library staff. We need to help our users find the resources they need and let the users know what the library can do for them.

I have set up several reflection groups within the Library looking at the future of our reading rooms, the profiles we will need for the future, the promotion of our historical collection of EU publications and how we can collaborate more with the other libraries of the EU institutions. The first results look very promising, and I look forward to seeing how we can implement some of the ideas emerging from these groups.

Off the Shelf (and the Trees) – from the World Bank Group Library & Publishing Program

Each year, the World Bank Group’s Library and Publishing Programs look forward to celebrating Earth Day and World Book & Copyright Day on April 22nd and 23rd. In an era of ever-growing digital connectivity and environmentally friendly measures, it’s fitting that these two dates fall next to each other.

The Library and Publishing programs have been at the forefront of caring for the Earth while supporting seamless access to knowledge and information. Their innovative services and solutions include:

•   Shifting Library purchases from print to digital formats.

•   Conducting special staff training and promotions on the Library’s wide collection of internal and external eBooks and audiobooks that can be accessed online from the office, home, or through mobile devices.

•   Relying on digital workflows and dissemination of World Bank Publications to numerous digital channels. These include the latest titles on COVID-19; World Development Report; Women, Business and the Law; Global Economic Prospects; and the Poverty and Shared Prosperity series.

•   Printing and shipping World Bank Publications through regional “Print-on-Demand” hubs closer to readers that prefer or need print copies due to limited connectivity.

•   Celebrating World Book & Copyright Day to raise awareness of copyright issues and the latest eBooks in the Open Knowledge Repository, World Bank eLibrary and WBG Library resources.

•   Participating in the internal “PrintBusters” campaign to reduce printing and the Bank’s carbon footprint.

The WBG Library and Publishing Programs are proud of these initiatives that contribute to a more sustainable planet while staying connected to knowledge that impacts the World Bank’s work and mission.