The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Board of Directors unanimously voted on 26 July to endorse a set of nine Principles to guide vendor/publisher relations in large-scale digitization projects of special collections materials, recommended by its Transforming Special Collections in the Digital Age Working Group.

SPARC has published a report from Australian economist John Houghton and colleagues at Victoria University on measuring the impact of the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act in the USA on returns to public investment in research and development.

The DART-Europe portal for Open Access E-Theses has received its first Italian contributor - Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. This represents the first Italian University which has been able to establish the infrastructure to allow us to harvest their metadata. We are still hopeful that more Italian Universities and consortia will follow their lead.

The following appointments to the LIBER Executive Board were made at the Meeting of Participants held in Aarhus State and University Library on Thursday 1 July 2010:

• President, Dr Paul Ayris, UCL (University College London), London, UK
• Vice-President, Ms Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen, National Library of Finland, Helsinki, Finland
• Treasurer, Drs Bas Savenije, National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague, Netherlands

In addition, the following were appointed Board Members by the Meeting of Participants:

Europeana has published its first White Paper entitled "Knowledge = Information in Context: on the Importance of Semantic Contextualisation in Europeana", written by Professor Stefan Gradmann, Berlin School of Library and Information Science / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.