To stay relevant, public libraries must develop strong relationships with their communities, and meet their information, education or leisure needs. Also, public libraries should know local socio-economic development priorities to make sure that they can contribute to these. For librarians, this means constantly learning new skills or upgrading old ones so that that they are confidently able to offer new and innovative services to meet changing needs and priorities.

Teresa Hackett, EIFL Copyright and Libraries Programme Manager participated in the 36th meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), the global body that sets international copyright law and policy, that took place from 28 May to 1 June 2018. During the busy week, EIFL engaged in discussions on libraries and archives, made interventions in plenary sessions, met with member state delegates and collaborated with NGO partners.

EIFL has been working with public libraries in Africa since 2010, supporting introduction of new services that use computers and the internet. In the course of our work, we observed that public librarians were struggling to collect statistics about their new services. Statistics gathering was limited to basic library operations, like lending books and library membership numbers.

‘Is your institution willing and committed to offer training on open access, open research data and open science as a part of standard training for PhD students?’

This is the question we asked our network a year ago. We also offered support in developing such training courses for those who were interested.

EIFL is participating in Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, an annual celebration designed to highlight the opportunities presented by fair use and fair dealing, celebrate success stories, and explain these doctrines. In 2018, Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week runs from 26 February - 2 March. Over 45 countries around the world have a fair use or fair dealing provision in their copyright law.

Open scholarship is growing in importance as a way of ensuring that there is global participation in research, improved quality and efficiency of education and science, and faster economic and social progress.

Over the next two years, the EIFL Open Access Programme will support open scholarship by focusing on four key areas: open access policies, open science training for early career researchers, sustainable open access journals and repositories, and Open Educational Resources.

In recent years, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), Europe’s highest court, has made three important rulings concerning digital library activities in Europe.

The first of the three CJEU rulings took place in 2014, and originated in Germany in a case known as ‘TU Darmstadt’ (Case C-117/13). The ruling in TU Darmstadt is seen as a significant boost for European libraries to digitize works in their collections and to make them available in library reading rooms.

Teresa Hackett, EIFL Copyright and Libraries Programme Manager, reports on a busy week advocating for libraries at the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR/35) which met in Geneva from 13-17 November 2017.

In June 2017, EIFL invited the global open access full text aggregator CORE to take part in an Open Science train-the-trainer course for universities and research institutions in EIFL partner countries. Our guest blogger, Nancy Pontika, CORE Open Access Aggregation Officer, writes about the experience.

In August, a group of 13 young African public librarians travelled to Eastern Europe (Lithuania and Poland) on a 12-day journey to take part in an intensive learning, knowledge-sharing and networking experience organized by EIFL and partners as part of the Initiative for Young African Library Innovators (IYALI). After their journey, we asked the IYALI participants to reflect on the main takeaways. Here’s what they said.