International cooperation
DEFF’s international involvement includes four main elements:
Mediation: DEFF uses new knowledge from abroad to launch initiatives among the research libraries and mediates Danish experiences abroad
Profiling: DEFF profiles the cooperation between Danish research libraries abroad
Benchmarking: DEFF compares Danish results with results from abroad in order to ensure current improvements
Coordination: DEFF coordinates initiatives with overseas countries in order to avoid duplicate development
Knowledge Exchange
Knowledge Exchange (KE) is the result of a formal international partnership between the German DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), British JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), Dutch SURFfoundation and Danish DEFF. KE has a secretariat, placed in the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media. The overall KE-vision is to make a layer of academic and scientific content freely available on the Internet. Through KE the four partners coordinate and develop their national initiatives.
The vision is supported through a number of action lines:
- European Commission
- Strategy
- Interoperability
- Libraries in the Digital Age
- Licensing
- Open Access
- Primary Research Data
- Virtual Research Environments
Theme: Access to digital information
The price for access to scientific information is often very steep, which means there is only access for subscribers who can pay. Many institutions pay a constantly rising price in order to provide access to publicly financed research. At the same time potential user groups, who cannot afford the price, cannot gain access to relevant resources. It may seem paradoxical that digital distribution results in high prices and limited access. Open Access emerged as a reaction to this situation.
The first major collective Open Access initiative, Budapest Open Access from 2001, reacted against the limited access and stressed that the Internet as technology could in fact be used to facilitate access to scientific information.
It was underlined here that research is a public benefit which ought to be made freely available.
Another initiative to improve access is the endeavours to offer students and scholars integrated search. With inspiration from Google and Amazon the libraries wish to offer students and researchers intuitive search engines that search in all relevant data sources at once. In this way the users can in one go search in journals from more than 100 different suppliers, databases, the libraries’ book collections, institutional archives and digitised material.
"Information resources need to be more clearly embedded in the workflow of researchers and students or be at their point of need. You can’t tell them to build their workflow around the library."
Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President and Chief Strategist of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), from interview in connection with the project Fremtidens biblioteksbetjening af forskere
Publication may be found at the address http://www.bibliotekogmedier.dk/fileadmin/publikationer/publikationer_engelske/deff/profile/index.htm