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Although the “open access” and “bibliography” appear to be contradictory concepts, as the first applies to the idea of direct and unrestricted access and the use of the resources' content and the latter refers to the list of resources' descriptions, the issue of open access to bibliography is widely discussed by the librarians' community nowadays. This paper aims to elaborate on the subject of the Polish national bibliographic agency's approach along with its experiences and problems.

“Open Access to National Bibliographies: Best Practices and Business Models” was the subject of the Bibliographic Section's session of the IFLA World Library and Information Congress that took place in Gothenburg in 2010. This article is based on a discussion paper presented at the session.

The better realization of the idea of “open access” to bibliography needs more effort and further cooperation among the libraries, publishers and institutions of law especially in respect of copyright, legal deposit and press laws. International exchange of experience and popularization of good practice in this field is necessary for success and inclusion of the national bibliography into open bibliographic universe.

The Polish National Bibliography is a public good, i.e. a non‐commercial product. Its principal aim is to give complete and reliable bibliographic data about the intellectual and cultural heritage and to make them easily accessible not only for librarians and other actors of the publishing market, but also for the general public.

Finland had a legislation-based centralized collection policy until the mid-1990s. The main components were national resource centers (selected higher education libraries) and provincial libraries (selected public libraries). This paradigm changed during the recession of the 1990s when new public management ideologies were adopted by the government. This ended the centralized model and a new policy favoring a decentralized collection management which demanded resource sharing. The models designated for the print-only age became obsolete also when the digital dissemination of especially scientific documents began to be the norm. The Finnish libraries have started to implement a new strategy consisting of different elements including a new model of library automation systems, the National Repository which is the hub for the resource sharing of print materials, digitization projects (to be especially implemented by the National Library) and with new policies defining the roles and responsibilities of each of the libraries involved. This article aims to describe the history of the Finnish centralized collection policy, its shift to the modern management of the collection as well as the philosophy and tools used in this work.

The paper describes the evolution of the Finnish national collection policy and its main trends.

The National Repository Library has enabled Finnish university libraries to focus their collection policies and to make savings in the cost of premises. A new business model for the digital era is needed for document sharing between libraries.

The paper is based on Finnish experiences.

Models for national and international collection and preservation policies are presented.

The paper provides proposals for the building of global division of work in the long-tail management of documents.

The literature of the social sciences is characterized by a very wide variety of types, from conventional books and journals through official publications and report literature to ephemera, and of formats, from conventional volumes through individual sheets to films and sound recordings. Its total quantity is vast, and much of it raises major problems of availability. Legal deposit of many categories is very inadequate, and for this and other reasons bibliographic control is very poor. Most social science documents are not produced and supplied through normal publication and distribution channels, so that they are very difficult to identify and acquire; much of it can only be acquired locally. Many kinds of materials are also hard for libraries to record and store, and traditional methods are not appropriate or practicable. Improvement of availability must rest partly with local libraries and partly with the national library, which can encourage local collection, set standards, co‐ordinate activity, and aid bibliographic control. A complete solution is unattainable, and any steps towards increased availability are to be welcomed.

The purpose of this paper is to point out that past models of information ownership may not carry over to the age of digital information. The fact that public ownership of information (for example, by means of national and public library collections) created social benefits in the past does not mean that a greater degree of private sector involvement in information provision in the knowledge society of today is synonymous with an abandonment of past ideals of social information provision.

A brief review of recent issues in digital preservation and national electronic heritage management, with an examination of the public–private sector characteristics of each issue.

Private companies and philanthropic endeavours focussing on the business of digital information provision have done some things – which in the past we have associated with the public domain – remarkably well. It is probably fair to say that this has occurred against the pattern of expectation of the library profession.

The premise of this paper is that LIS research aimed at predicting future patterns of problem solving in information work should avoid the narrow use of patterns of public–private relationships inherited from a previous, print‐based information order.

This paper suggests practical ways in which the library and information profession can improve digital library services by looking to form creative partnerships with private sector problem solvers.

This paper argues that the LIS profession should not take a doctrinaire approach to commercial company involvement in “our” information world. Librarians should facilitate collaboration between all parties, both public and private, to create original solutions to contemporary information provision problems. In this way we can help create pragmatic, non‐doctrinaire solutions that really do work for the citizens of our contemporary information society.

Newspapers are a useful source of research information However, without proper preservation and indexing services information from newspapers is difficult to access and use in an effective manner. Press clippings are a way out of this problem both in terms of the preservation of the newspapers and access to them, albeit on a highly selective basis. It is the contention in this paper that with proper planning, preparation and in selected subjects, access to newspaper information is enhanced through a systematic press cuttings project that is sufficiently broad‐based in terms of newspaper coverage. The paper discusses preservation concerns of keeping newspaper collections and makes some recommendations which could help other libraries intending to embark on a similar project.

Preserving the vast amount of digitally published data is of paramount importance to maintaining the intellectual heritage. In order that resources can be deposited, managed and retrieved, it will be necessary to accurately describe what has been preserved and how it has been preserved. This paper looks at the problems of producing accurate and effective metadata that describe preserved resources without incurring a prohibitive cost overhead. It investigates the extent to which existing metadata standards may be able to address this problem and specifically analyses whether ONIX metadata could be integrated into the preservation process.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief description of the digital preservation programme at the National Library of New Zealand.

Following a description of the legislative and strategic context for digital preservation in New Zealand, details are provided of the system for the National Digital Heritage Archive (NDHA), developed with help from Ex Libris, and marketed as Rosetta. A small survey of staff attitudes to the NDHA was also carried out.

Key factors to be considered by others developing a digital preservation programme include: definition of strategic drivers; choice of a suitable business model; defining the exact purpose of the digital preservation programme; deployment and implementation; staffing aspects; and how to get started.

The National Library of New Zealand has been a leading organisation in digital preservation and its experiences will be of relevance to many other libraries throughout the world.

The establishment of the British Library (BL) from the Parry Report of 1967, through Dainton in 1969, to the White Paper of 1971 and the Act of 1972, was contemporaneous with the formation of the polytechnics. The latter had their origins in the White Paper of 1966, A Plan for Polytechnics. The majority of the polytechnics were formed in 1970/71. Their libraries have grown, without central government assistance, to respectable size.

The purpose of this paper is to present the Danish inter‐library lending (ILL) environment with the focus on its current status, the level of automation and future development.

The paper describes Danish ILL cooperation.

Focussing on standards and automation delivers a better service. Danish ILL has a high level of automation. The combination of standards, interaction between systems and dedicated functions in the national system delivers an effective handling of ILL and document delivery.

This is the first paper to provide a detailed overview of the modern ILL system in Denmark.

Science policy and practice for open access (OA) books is a rapidly evolving area in the scholarly domain. However, there is much that remains unknown, including how many OA books there are and to what degree they are included in preservation coverage. The purpose of this study is to contribute towards filling this knowledge gap in order to advance both research and practice in the domain of OA books.

This study utilized open bibliometric data sources to aggregate a harmonized dataset of metadata records for OA books (data sources: the Directory of Open Access Books, OpenAIRE, OpenAlex, Scielo Books, The Lens, and WorldCat). This dataset was then cross-matched based on unique identifiers and book titles to openly available content listings of trusted preservation services (data sources: Cariniana Network, CLOCKSS, Global LOCKSS Network, and Portico). The web domains of the OA books were determined by querying the web addresses or digital object identifiers provided in the metadata of the bibliometric database entries.

In total, 396,995 unique records were identified from the OA book bibliometric sources, of which 19% were found to be included in at least one of the preservation services. The results suggest reason for concern for the long tail of OA books distributed at thousands of different web domains as these include volatile cloud storage or sometimes no longer contained the files at all.

Data quality issues, varying definitions of OA across services and inconsistent implementation of unique identifiers were discovered as key challenges. The study includes recommendations for publishers, libraries, data providers and preservation services for improving monitoring and practices for OA book preservation.

This study provides methodological and empirical findings for advancing the practices of OA book publishing, preservation and research.