LIBER Participation in EU-funded projects

As part of LIBER's strategy to connect and represent research libraries in Europe, LIBER has a strong focus on initiating and co-ordinating strategic and innovative European projects.

We are currently partners in the following European projects:

APARSEN (Alliance Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe Network)

Europeana Libraries

MedOANet

ODE (Opportunities for Data Exchange)

AAA Study

Europeana Newspapers

APARSEN

FP7 ICT 2009.4.1

45 participants attended the kick-off meeting for APARSEN in Madrid in January. APARSEN is a 4 year project, the aim of which is to overcome fragmentation in research and development in digital preservation by bringing together major European players to combine and integrate these efforts into a shared programme of work, thereby creating a pre-eminent virtual research centre in digital preservation in Europe.

LIBER members, The National Library of Austria (ONB) and the University of Patras (UPAT), have key roles to play in the project in the areas of business cases and raising awareness.

Europeana Libraries

January was also the month for the formal kick-off meeting of Europeana Libraries. For LIBER, Europeana Libraries is an important development project which will deliver metadata for 5,000,000 digital objects from several LIBER member institutions, into the Europeana portal; the project will also investigate the indexing of full-text. The project will construct a Best Practice Network, bringing together LIBER, CENL, CERL and Europeana.

Europeana Libraries will also construct an aggregating tool, which will (at the end of the project) be available for use by all LIBER members.

LIBER’s roles will be to focus on creating a sustainable business model for aggregating content into Europeana, as well as communication and promotion.

MedOANet

MedOANet will identify and map existing strategies, structures and policies of Open Access in six countries of the Mediterranean area (Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Turkey) into an online ‘Mediterranean Open Access Tracker’.

MEDOANETproject activities will facilitate the development of explicit and coordinated Open Access strategies and policies in the aforementioned and neighboring countries, as well as reinforce regional coordination of strategies and structures among Member States.

The project consortium is made up of 9 partners led by the National Documentation Centre (EKT/NHRF) in Greece. The project has recently received approval and is set to kick-off in December.

LIBER will focus on strategic networking within this project as well as providing a pan-European perspective. LIBER will be engaged in the following tasks:

• Mapping policies, strategies and structures
• Guidelines towards implementing Open Access policies
• Strategic Networking

ODE

ODE had its kick-off meeting at the end of November and has embarked on the first two key fact-finding missions.

The first is the identification of success stories, near-misses and honorable failures in data sharing in a few selected disciplines. A set of several dozen potential interviewees has been drafted and conversations began in January.

A second key activity is the analysis of the interplay between scholarly communication today and data. Who is paying attention to this new force to be reckoned with among publishers? And libraries? And what is the interplay? A very successful workshop on linking data to publications took place at the LIBER annual conference in Barcelona. Issues raised during this workshop will be included in a survey, which will go out to LIBER members in early Autumn.

Study on AAA (authentication, authorization and accounting) platforms and services for scientific data/information resources in Europe 

In December 2011 the Consortium composed of TERENA, LIBER, UvA, and DEENK, was awarded a contract by the European Commission to carry out a study into AAA (authentication, authorisation and accounting) platforms and services for scientific data/information resources.

The goal of this study is to provide recommendations for the development and deployment of a Scientific Data e-Infrastructure (SDI) that would enable access to heterogonous data for researchers and citizens alike. The SDI should be delivered integrating as much as possible existing AAA platforms (such as those used by the research and education community, or those used by the eScience community). The study will therefore will identify use-cases for the SDI; it will assess existing AAA-infrastructures as well as the ability for the existing AAA-infrastructures to address these use-cases; the study will also examine the gaps in providing the necessary infrastructure to support the use-cases and explore the work that is being done in the existing AAA-infrastructures to address those needs.

The results of the study in the forms of technical and policy recommendations will be used in developing a strategy, in particular, for Scientific Data Infrastructures in Europe that will support science by providing access to quality services for researchers, funding agencies and for the public at large.

The targeted actors in the study are the research and education communities, information service providers (data centres, libraries) and e-Infrastructure/technology providers. 

For further information see: https://confluence.terena.org/display/aaastudy

A Gateway to European Newspapers Online

The Europeana Newspapers project (funded under EC's CIP 2007 - 2013) aims at the aggregation and refinement of newspapers for The European Library and Europeana.