Records from the Institute of Education's online catalogue have been added to COPAC.

Library

Deputy Librarian

Circa £50,000 pa

It is with delight that CURL announces that Robin Green, currently at the University of Warwick Library, has been appointed to the post of CURL Executive Director. Robin will take up his post at the beginning of March. The CURL secretariat will continue to be based at Birmingham.

The Victoria & Albert Museum has become a Member of CURL, effective from 1 January.

A new service is starting development to support the rapidly emerging movement towards Open Access to research information. The new service, called DOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - will categorise and list the wide variety of Open Access research archives that have grown up around the world. Such repositories have mushroomed over the last 2 years in response to calls by scholars and researchers worldwide to provide open access to research information.

In September 2006, the RIN and CURL jointly commissioned a study to provide an up-to-date view on how researchers interact with and perceive academic library services in the UK. The project involved extensive canvassing of views from over 2250 researchers and 300 librarians, notably through a detailed questionnaire and qualitative insights derived from focus group meetings. The task of undertaking the work was entrusted to the Key Perspectives consultancy.

The CURL AGM and Business meeting took place over 26-27 April, at the Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / National Library of Wales. The topical meeting took in and discussed: Integrated resource management, discovery and delivery and Digital development at the the National Library of Wales; Cross-domain discovery and digitisation at the V&A; A report on the progress being made by the UK Research Reserve project; Research pools in Scotland, and Fundraising.

This a CURL/SCONUL joint e-Research Task Force (eRTF) event aimed at library and information professionals. Booking is now open for this two day workshop hosted by the National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh, 14-15 June 2007. Full details including the draft programme are available on the NeSC website:

http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/770/

The Copac Challenge Fund, an initiative jointly funded by CURL, RIN and the British Library to extend the coverage of Copac, has received the first files of data from the University of Essex and the University of Exeter. The data will now be processed and loaded into the databases. The collections of the twelve libraries selected by the Challenge Fund panel will be loaded by Spring 2008.