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People
Graham Cornish, UAP Core Programme Director, became President of the (UK) Library Association at the beginning of the year, and was consequently able to spend far less time on IFLA UAP responsibilities than he had done previously. Richard Ebdon left the UAP Office in July to take up a new post within the British Library and his post was filled on promotion by Tracy Bentley, already a member of the Office. This change of personnel gave us the opportunity to clarify the roles of the six members of the joint British Library Copyright Office/IFLA UAP Office. Judy Watkins and Tracy Bentley now make up the BL Copyright Office, Sara Gould and Pauline Connolly work solely for IFLA UAP and Office for International Lending, each in a part time 50% capacity. In addition, Pauline works separately as Assistant Editor for the journal 'Interlending and Document Supply'. Graham shares his time between his two jobs as Head of the BL Copyright Office and Director of the UAP Programme. After a delay of several months we have recently been given permission to fill the Office Support post previously held by Tracy. Neil Holding joined us on 8 January 2001, and will work entirely for the IFLA side of the Office, concentrating mainly on the ever-increasing task of processing orders for IFLA Vouchers.
Ongoing activities
The IFLA Voucher Scheme continues to be very popular, and in some ways is becoming a victim of its own success. This postal payment system, based on plastic re-circulating refundable vouchers, continues to show an increase in the number of orders received, and a smaller, but significant increase in the number of vouchers sent in for refund. There is no doubt that the Voucher Scheme fills a need among libraries for a simple ILL payment system, and has been welcomed by libraries worldwide. At a time when more and more requests are being processed electronically, it is surprising that the demand for plastic payment tokens shows no sign of slowing down, and we are aware, within UAP, that significant resources are being used to maintain the IFLA Voucher Scheme service. With a staffing gap for the last few months of 2000, it has been difficult at times to maintain the necessary high levels of service in this area.
For some time now, we have considered the idea of moving towards an "electronic voucher scheme", but no progress was made in 2000 in this area. However, there has been some recent interest from RLG to build a payments element to their ILL Manager Software, and talks have begun between UAP, RLG and the Library of Congress (the biggest ILL net-supplier accepting IFLA Vouchers) on how we might work together to our mutual benefit.
The Office has made regular contributions for many years to the journal "Interlending and Document Supply", in the form of regular reviews, bibliographies and a Miscellany column, and this work has helped us to identify emerging trends and challenges to universal access, and to promote our work to a certain extent through the journal. While this may not be viewed as core UAP activity, it does bring in some financial support and as such, is a valuable regular commitment. In 2000, two review articles on interlending and document supply, two bibliographies in the same field, and four Miscellany columns were produced for the journal.
Pauline Connolly took up the post of Assistant Editor of the same journal during 2000. Again, while this is not something she does as part of the work of UAP, the Office receives funding for this work, which provides an opportunity to identify concerns and challenges in the area of UAP and international lending.
Projects
The IFLA Twinning Database was laid to rest in October 2000, after a three year project, which uncovered a large interest in the idea of library twinning, but a shortage of resources in many of the libraries wanting to establish partnerships. The IFLA Twinning Database was developed after a UNESCO study identified a need for a focal point, to which libraries could apply when seeking a twinning partner. Funded largely by UNESCO, our work established that many libraries were interested in building twinning partnerships, and sought assistance in finding potential partners. However we concluded that a database - which bore a great deal of similarity to Dateline, the dating agency - was not a successful tool for matching libraries and finally concluded that we should close down the database, since it had not produced the results we had hoped for, and we could not continue to justify spending resources on its management.
A successful workshop held jointly with Round Table on Continuing Professional Education (CPERT) in Jerusalem explored our concerns in depth, and revealed other players in the field, which at least partly, answer the needs of our database users. The IFLA section on Scientific and Technical Libraries has also carried out work in this area, and maintains some IFLANET resource pages, to which we now direct enquiries.
In 1998 we began our work with IFLA PAC on the IFLA/UNESCO Survey on Digitisation and Preservation. Carried out within the framework of UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme, this work had already almost been completed by early 2000. The report "IFLA/UNESCO Survey on Digitisation and Preservation" has been translated into French, Spanish and Russian and is available in print and on the web. Approximately 1000 English-language copies have been distributed free of charge. The web-based Directory of Digitised Collections was developed by UAP, with technical support from the BL, and was due to be transferred to its permanent home on the UNESCO website early in 2000. Due to major technical problems at UNESCO and other delays, the Directory has still not been transferred, although the site has been expanded and maintained by UNESCO since July 2000. The Directory, which should finally be transferred by the end of January, has attracted much interest, and is likely to continue to expand into a major gateway to significant cultural heritage collections which have been digitised.
Document Delivery and Interlending
In our capacity as Office for International Lending, we continue to maintain strong links with the IFLA Section on Document Delivery and Interlending (DDIL), and worked together on various tasks during 2000.
In particular, a small sub-committee of DDIL Section members and UAP staff was established to undertake a major revision of the document "International Lending and Document Delivery: Principles and Guidelines for Procedure", and the related "Model National ILL Code". The Sub-Committee met twice during 2000, and again in Jerusalem, and has now produced a final revision, which is expected to be approved by the Professional Board at its March meeting. The interlending principles form the major basis of international ILL and resource-sharing, and set out the responsibilities of individual nations in document provision. The document had not been revised since 1983, and now includes sections on copyright and charging where none existed previously.
Work on the introduction of a multi-lingual list of ILL responses to be used in cases of non-supply continued in 2000, although this was one project which was hampered by staff changes in the Office. Richard Ebdon had worked with colleagues around the world in order to produce a definitive list of responses. Numeric codes have now been applied to each response and work has begun on having the list translated into a wide number of languages to help libraries overcome linguistic barriers when handling international ILL requests.
The seventh International Conference on Interlending & Document Supply will take place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, from 1-5 October 2001. Sara Gould and Pauline Connolly visited Ljubljana in October 2000 to meet with Ivan Kanic of the National and University Library of Slovenia to begin the organisation of the Conference. Mr Kanic has responsibility for the administrative organisation of the Conference, while the Office for International Lending will oversee the professional programme, relationship with sponsors and exhibitors, and the production of the conference handbook and other documentation. A Call for Papers was issued in November 2000, and work will continue in 2001 to ensure another successful conference in this series.
Repository libraries have been subject of renewed awareness in recent years, following the first International Conference on Repository Libraries, which took place in May 1999, and the establishment of an IFLA Discussion Group and related internet discussion list. Repository libraries play a vital role in ensuring continued access to little-used material, and are an important player in the aims of UAP. The UAP Office took part in the 2nd Nordic-Baltic Repository Library meeting in Norway in October 2000, and supports further co-operation among repository libraries, both within that region and internationally. Both the Nordic-Baltic group and the IFLA Discussion Group have plans for research into current repository library practice, the possible development of best practice guidelines, an assessment of the need to offer a redistribution service, and the role of repository libraries in the electronic world. The UAP Office has pledged its support to work together in these areas.
Publications
Three new titles were published by the Office in 2000:
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Parabaik and Megabyte: Measuring Progress in Library Development in South East Asia. Papers from two seminars held during the 65th IFLA General Conference, August 20-28 1999, Bangkok. Edited by Sara Gould
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Interlending and Document Supply: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference held in Pretoria, South Africa, 25-29 October 1999. Edited by Sara Gould.
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The Digital Library: challenges and solutions for the new Millennium: proceedings of an International Conference held in Bologna, Italy, June 1999. Edited by Pauline Connolly and Denis Reidy.
CLM
As secretariat for CLM, Sara Gould acted as rapporteur at the two business meetings in Jerusalem, and the Office has continued to manage the CLM discussion list, as well as carrying out various other support tasks for CLM. The task of CLM list administrator has now passed from Tracy Bentley to Neil Holding.
Other activity
UAP staff have also participated in several conferences and seminars, such as the first Portuguese National Interlibrary Loan Seminar held in Lisbon in October 2000 where Sara Gould presented a paper on international library co-operation and the role of IFLA UAP. A busy poster session was held in Jerusalem, where Sara Gould and Pauline Connolly also organised, chaired and presented a paper at the Twinning Workshop, attended the business meetings of the DDIL Section Committee and many of the general workshops and sessions.
We have extensively revised and expanded the UAP pages of IFLANET, and these now have a direct link from the "Frequently Asked Questions" page of the DDIL Section site. Two UAP Newsletters were produced in 2000.
The UAP Core Programme is grateful to the British Library for its continued support in the form of both staff and administrative backup, without which much of our work would not be possible.
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