Subject: News from IFLA
From: Tuula Haavisto (tuulah@kaapeli.fi)
Date: Thu 13 Sep 2001 - 13:54:06 EEST
Dear colleagues
Back home from the Budapest CELIP workshop, but quite upset with the
on-line TV sendings I could follow on the Budapest and Zürich airports…
I'm afraid we are witnessing a change in the world (mental) history, and
not in a positive way.
However, I want to share with you some news from the IFLA conference and
the pre-conference on consortia and licensing. Many of the SG members were
there and can add if they heard something else worth telling.
First of all, Maja Z. was the star of her session. The two
native-English-speaking speakers before her just red their (boring)
papers, but Maja told a story, supporting it with her PowerPoint
presentation. Nice indeed!
The CELIP Poster Session was also popular. This time the location of the
poster sessions was exceptionally good, and it was one of the real meeting
points of the whole conference. Thus I met several interested colleagues,
and discussed about CELIP a lot. The photos I had from Prague, Bucharest
and Zilina were very popular, too!
The Committee on Copyright and other Legal Matters (CLM) concerned several
significant subjects.
THE NEW ROUND OF THE WTO NEGOTIATIONS. CLM approved a paper titled "The
IFLA Position on The World Trade Organisation". It describes how the WTO
negotiations can threaten libraries. It was sent to the IFLA Governing
Board (ex Executive Board) to be adopted. There was some hope to get the
paper accepted during the Autumn. This paper is very important - I am
going to translate it into Finnish. The Finnish LA will probably formulate
a letter based to it, and send it to the national delegation to the WTO
negotiations. The statement is not yet available on the IFLA website, but
I have a hard copy of it, if you want to read it.
Last year in Jerusalem Paul Whitney of Canada, one of the colleagues
behind the whole library & WTO movements, gave presentation about this
topic. You can find it on the web:
http://ifla.inist.fr/III/clm/p1/whitney.pdf
THE HAGUE CONVENTION (officially: The Draft Hague Convention on
Jurisdiction and Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Cases)
is a new phenomenon. It is an effort to create jurisdictional rules
governing international lawsuits and provide for recognition and
enforcement of judgements by the courts of Member States. This concerns
also disagreements about licensing contracts in case the provider is
international. Therefore, the American Library Association has suggested
to the U.S. negotiators a text revision which would make it possible to
protect institutions like libraries in the choice of law court in cases of
non-negotiable contracts (like shrink-wrap or click contracts) - these
institutions should not be forced to go to a court in a foreign country
(usually U.S.A. or U.K.). The presentation of Miriam B. Nisbet from the
American Library Association can be red on the web:
http://ifla.inist.fr/IV/ifla67/papers/092-167e.pdf
COPYRIGHT. IFLA and the International Publishers Association IPA had a
short negotiation about the copyright matters. IPA was not pleased with
the IFLA copyright statement (http://www.ifla.org/V/press/copydig.htm).
The IFLA representatives said, it is clear that 20% of the content of such
statements cannot be agreed by opposite partners, and IFLA will not change
its statement at this point. The official press release about the meeting:
http://www.ifla.org/III/misc/pr310801.htm.
In the pre-conference I learned a lot. I already up-dated my workshop
notes for Budapest according to this. The website of the pre-conference,
including the PowerPoint presentations:
http://www.nelinet.net/conf/ifla/ifla.htm
In the UNITED STATES THE LICENSING SITUATION is different from most
European countries. Each library is a member of several consortia, and in
addition to them has several individual contracts with vendors. It seemed
the contract administration is not very well organised; a colleague from a
middle-sized research library told that she does not have a database about
when the contracts have their dead lines or any other organised
information about its licensing situation. Her library was not the only
case of this kind.
The U.S. consortia work on opposite way. They are like co-operatives,
owned by their users but acting like companies. They sell their services
to their members, and are run like business. The newest phenomenon was
that the consortia sell services to each others. E.g. the CORBIS portal is
nowadays used in some other consortia as well.
Tom Sanville from Ohiolink, a very successful consortium, told about his
work:
- the storage costs of the participating libraries have been minimised,
and the surplus is used for buying electronic resources.
- Nowadays, after the first start phase, ca. 70% of the Ohiolink costs go
to content buying
- The dynamics of use can change dramatically: the user statistics can
multiply, if the access to a resource is structured better, and if
systematic user education exists; this is due to the fact that browsing
becomes general, the intensity of database use is growing à the price of a
single use is getting cheaper
- From this fact Sanville made a conclusion for his resource discussions:
he asks money for making the price of one usage still lower. He
prioritised this argument to the common argument that libraries need more
money to buy the more and more expensive journals = they ask more money to
buy less material.
The PUBLISHER/VENDOR situation is continuously turbulent. Especially
mergers and their consequences (whose policy is in force after the deal,
the one of the old or the new owner?) varying pricing models etc. keep the
situation unsure and somehow unsafe for libraries, too.
USER STATISTICS was one of the most interesting themes of the
pre-conference. When getting more experienced, this is a good guide for
the future decisions on material selection. We heard that the first
efforts to cut out subscriptions based to minor use have been made. Two
consequences were reported: 1) the provider promises the same amount of
material + more, if the subscription is not cancelled, 2) be careful with
the humaniora and social sciences: the usage profile of those is
developing on slower pace than in the sciences, don't cut the
subscriptions too early. On the other hand, the basics for the statistics
is not yet finally defined. E.g. the consortia members must find a
consensus of what is "one use", what will be metered. JISC in the United
Kingdom has good methods. Their new project to develop the statistics can
be found on www.jisc.ac.uk/curriss/collab/c6_pub/uswg/
A detail about the USER FRAMES to the electronic resources: in the eyes of
students, Google has set the standard. If the libraries cannot offer
something better, they are considered to be straggled...
One important phenomenon which I met in several IFLA occasions is the
movements to facilitate ACCESS TO DIGITAL INFORMATION. The idea is to
create applications of the fact, that once digitised, any material is
basically easily available all around the world. Why not to sell it for
cheaper price for poorer countries, or even give it for free?
This movement has two lines. The first covers several efforts to offer
free or reasonably priced research information especially for developing
and transition countries. E.g. the World Health Organisation and Open
Society Institute negotiate with Elsevier, ISI and SilverPlatter about a
concrete project on health care literature (a detail: on Elsevier, the
person in charge of this effort is the ex- Secretary General of IFLA, Leo
Voogt). MIT (Massachusets Institute of Technology) has published all its
course materials used in the Virtual University, free on the Internet. Of
these efforts I made the list which I sent to you last week. I try to
up-date the list if I hear about new interesting projects.
The second line/phenomenon was discussed in the CECUP SG: the researches
and learned societies have an interest to give their works to be used for
free, because the web offers this opportunity. They are fed up with the
publishers making money on their work. One initiative among the
biomedicine researchers, in force from the 1st of September, is to deny
their articles to be published in electronic journals without guaranteeing
to give them freely available in six months after the first publication.
ATTN! If a publisher gives a chargeable material to be used in some
countries on cheaper price or for free, there will still be costs. The
administration of the free access contracts and the logistics must be done
anyway.
An opposite type of news was heard about the Encyclopedia Britannica:
after being for a while free on the Internet, it must be licensed again.
I listened to views about E-BOOKS in several occasions. It seems the
concepts are still immature, no libraries were enthusiasted on them - only
some test cases with no encouraging results here and there. An American
colleague said, she is more in favour of books-on-demand than of e-books.
Finally, the "gift of the American libraries to IFLA" was launched in
Boston. The campaign "@ your library ", originally formed for the U.S.,
was internationalised and given for free to be used in all countries. The
matrial has partly been translated to all IFLA languages. @ your library
concerns marketing the idea of modern libraries which offer all kinds of
materials. The website: http://ifla.inist.fr/@yourlibrary.htm, but there
is a link from the IFLA front page, too: http://ifla.inist.fr (this is to
the European mirror site in France). My computer did not like the @ in the
web address...
Hoping there was something interesting for you,
Tuula
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Tuula Haavisto (Ms.)
Project Manager
CELIP www.eblida.org/celip/
(Central and Eastern European Licensing Information Platform)
e-mail tuulah@kaapeli.fi c/o e-Office
mobile tel. +358 - 40 - 568 9396 (earlier Virtual Office)
In Finland 040 - 568 9396 4. Linja 24
faxes: +358 - 9 - 7289 6050 FIN-00530 Helsinki
and 7289 5060 Finland
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