High Energy Physics Libraries Webzine

News Issue 3

The Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative and Peer Review Journals in Europe will take place at CERN, Geneva, March 22nd till 24th 2001. The meeting has been organized on the initiative of the Access Division of LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche). CERN will provide its technical support to the workshop.
[http://documents.cern.ch/OAi/]
[http://www.kb.dk/guests/intl/liber/]

The purpose of the workshop is twofold: to promote the creation of OAI-compliant preprint archives in the context of co-operative agreements among institutions, and to explore new ways of implementing the essential peer-reviewing process. The meeting should propose innovative solutions for the self-archiving of refereed scientific literature.
[Tullio Basaglia, CERN Library]

In recent years the CERN Scientific Information Service has developed a staff exchange programme with other libraries working with similar user groups. So far this has included visits to  DESY in Hamburg and SLAC in California, with stays lasting between two to four weeks. There has also been a reciprocal visit to CERN from a librarian working at DESY.
In October, a three-week visit was arranged to the Los Alamos National Laboratory library in New Mexico. There, the library director Rick Luce, has adopted a business model for running the libary. The operational strategy includes continual performance reviews, strategic planning, information technology research and development, and there is a heavy
emphasis on quality control and customer satisfaction. Two key strategies for the library are ownership of data rather than access, and collaboration with as many outside institutions as possible. These policies have been so successful that the overall budget of the library has actually substantially increased over the last nine years.
The visit provided the opportunity for an in-depth appreciation of working practices, the chance to make valuable contacts (and friends), and will help facilitate future co-operative projects.
[Carmen O'Dell, CERN Library]

Reader Response