LIBER’s First Annual Report is Here!

We are delighted to share our first ever Annual Report. Presented inside are our activities, progress and achievements for the period June 2018 to May 2019.

In this period, our network grew to represent 451 Participants in 39 countries. Together we worked to introduce critical improvements for libraries to Europe’s new copyright legislation, to publish an Open Science Roadmap, to train future library directors through our Emerging Leaders programme and to share many best-practices, insights and training resources via our Working Groups.

LIBER has also represented the research library community at key events and collaborated on many important initiatives and projects, ensuring that our libraries stay updated on the latest innovations and that the research library perspective is accounted for in the research agenda.

On an organisational level, we placed a special emphasis this year on what is needed for LIBER to meet the growing needs of its network over the long-term. After examining the resources required to carry out our 2018-2022 Strategy and the expectations of our Participants, we published our Proposal for Ensuring LIBER’s Viability and Building on Success. At the same time, we revised LIBER’s internal operations (improving efficiency) and developed a new sponsorship strategy. 

We are very grateful to our research libraries and sponsors for their ongoing support and contribution. We look forward to continuing our collaboration on activities which fit our strategic themes (Innovative Scholarly Communication, Digital Skills and Services, and Research Infrastructure) as we work towards a research landscape within which research libraries add value by Powering Sustainable Knowledge in the Digital Age.

Year Highlights

Among our achievements in 2018-2019, LIBER:

• Teamed up with the academic community to secure one new copyright exception for Text and Data Mining (TDM) in Europe’s revised Copyright Directive, plus improvements to help libraries with digital preservation and mass digitization.
• Hosted 440 delegates at our 47^th Annual conference in Lille, France and made 13 Conference Fund Awards so that delegates from selected European countries could attend.
• Distributed over 2500 copies of our Open Science Roadmap.
• Represented libraries in six funded projects on topics including altmetrics, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), Open Science training and Open Access.
• Welcomed 900 people to eight webinars on topics including copyright, RDM, skills and training and measuring impact.
• Published over 70 scholarly metrics recommendations for research libraries.
• Conducted six surveys looking at the FAIRness of repositories and their data, the landscape of Digital Humanities libraries in Europe, Open Science training, Linked Open Data and OA Monographs.
• Recommended six ways to improve the Plan S guidelines.
• Worked with four partners – IFLA, EBLIDA, SPARC Europe and Public Libraries 2030 – to endorse a Library Manifesto for Europe.

For more information on our activities, please read the full report.