Over the last few months 13 library organisations (including CURL), 4 archival institutions, Universities UK and the Association of University Teachers, have worked together to prevent academics, librarians and archivists being placed at risk through unintended consequences of unhelpful drafting of the Government’s Terrorism Bill.

Though the academic and information communities broadly support the purpose of the Bill, legal advice indicated that its wording could have served to criminalise their legitimate activities.

In early 2005, CURL and The British Library commissioned CHEMS Consulting to conduct a study into storage space in UK research libraries, particularly those in Higher Education.

University of Nottingham, UK and University of Lund, Sweden have developed a new service to help open access to research information.

OpenDOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - is pleased to announce the release of its primary listing of open access archives, available from www.opendoar.org.

25 January 2006 for immediate release

The British Library of Political and Economic Science has completed a Retrospective Catalogue
Conversion project making it one of the few major UK research libraries to have all its holdings
catalogued online. The project has converted all records for items listed in the Library’s older card
catalogues.
Jean Sykes, Librarian and Director of IT Services said:
“The Library is celebrating the completion of this major project which means that records for all Library

The British Library of Political and Economic Science has completed a Retrospective Catalogue Conversion project making it one of the few major UK research libraries to have all its holdings catalogued online. The project has converted all records for items listed in the Library’s older card catalogues.

Jean Sykes, Librarian and Director of IT Services said:

“The Library is celebrating the completion of this major project which means that records for all Library items can be accessed by researchers working anywhere in the world.”

On Tuesday 13 December leading Higher Education representatives responded to proposals for the development of a ‘National Research Reserve' (NRR) to store low use print collections. The NRR was presented as one of several options for the most efficient and cost-effective solution to the shortage of research library storage. All options are detailed in the report by CHEMS Consulting, ‘Optimising storage and access in UK research libraries'.

The result of the work co-commissioned by CURL and the JISC to assess the current provision of digitised (excluding born-digital) collections for UK-based researchers, this report is a major piece of work, whose recommendations include the establishment of a UK framework for digitisation; greater co-ordination of existing sevrices, and more investigation into users' needs.

CURL/SCONUL Joint Task Force on e-Research in conjunction with the Digital Curation Centre

This event is aimed at academic library practitioners and service managers below director level who want to know more about the UK’s e-research agenda. Academic services managers, subject librarians, and those responsible for institutional repositories are likely to find it most useful.

Debating the future of the UK’s Higher Education information infrastructure

In line with our new Strategic Plan, which shall be published shortly, and in collaboration with SCONUL and other sister organizations, CURL announces the creation of a dedicated group designed to explore and highlight the issues surrounding the impact of the 'data deluge', e-Science, and support for e-Research.