About the Open Perspectives Forum

Openness is key in librarianship, science and research. Our open community is a place for discussion, exchange and mutual learning - a safe place that provides a global perspective and access to thought leaders on the topics of ‘open’ from anywhere in the world. We invite you to join the community for the virtual Open Perspectives Forum. Register today.

Speakers

The Open Perspectives Forum includes an incredible mix of library experts who will discuss areas of open source, open access and open infrastructure. Join our great lineup of speakers who will discuss areas of ‘open’ in libraries today.  

Miklós Lendvay | Independent Consultant Library Platform, Klaris Publishing House and Artistic Workshop Ltd. 

Miklós Lendvay  received his IT-degree in Germany, specialising in modelling complex electrical circuits. He had the opportunity to implement his knowledge in practice as a design engineer at companies with nationwide and European networks. He has participated in several IT projects in 8 different European countries and took part in rethinking  existing systems and designing new ones. His responsibilities included the widest range of project tasks: design of the system, specifications, selection and implementation of the best technical solution, system testing, user training, followed several times by  maintenance / support work and continuous upgrades of the systems. Besides the selection of the most suitable technical solutions, he has also acted as a project manager of international-multicultural teams for over 30 years. He had the chance to gain professional experience at several types of companies, at different types of banks, foundations, associations, book and periodical publishing houses, acting in several countries of Europe, in the Hungarian National Library and in nationwide cooperation / consortia of libraries. At the National Széchényi Library, he has been the Director of e-Services / Information Technology for many years and has been the project manager of the so called Hungarian National Library Platform (HNLP – webpage: http://hnlp.oszk.hu), which is developing a cloud based distributed system for the whole library sector in Hungary, This is a very comprehensive solution; including the common catalogue, interlibrary loan, traditional Integrated Library System Functions, ISBN office, digital library, namespace, web archiving, mass digitisation, etc. He is actively encouraging the collaboration between all types of libraries within Hungary and abroad in this process. He is actively taking part in the international collaboration of the FOLIO community and platform (the Future of Libraries is Open).

PRESENTATION | Open Source: Open Source IT solutions supporting the library collaboration: data model, workflow, system architecture

ABSTRACT | Subtitle: Collaboration Opportunities in Open Source Platforms: Hungarian National Library Services Platform, FOLIO, ReShare

An important goal of library informatics is to create open source systems through community collaboration. The community of librarians and developers using these from 2016 onwards has taken the system to a higher level: a modular, microservice-based platform has been created; whose openness and flexibility have been expressed also in its name: The Future of Libraries is Open (FOLIO).

The basic goal of the development of the Hungarian National Library Platform (HNLP), was the same: to put the national library services on a new foundation, to open new channels for cooperation, to revolutionize the common catalogue and interlibrary loan, and to open the platform beyond the library world, through entity-based data connections.

The main pillars of the developments are the same for both FOLIO and HNLP: the entity-based data model; the creation of a meaningful integrated architecture through modularity, for any number of institutions and any institutional hierarchy; the free configurability of workflows across the system, i.e., flexible workflow design. Why is open source software inevitable to build a flexible system, to allow the participants self-determination?

Keven Liu | Deputy Director, Shanghai Library

Liu Wei is the Deputy Director of Shanghai Library and Institute of Scientific and Technological Information of Shanghai. He is also an adjunct professor of Fudan University, East China Normal University and Shanghai University, acts as a doctoral tutor and gives lectures on Digital Libraries and Digital Humanities. Since 1995, he has taken  part in many major Digital Library projects in China. He is in charge of the information technology application in Shanghai Library and very active in developing “Smart Library” services for the Library. He is also the Vice Chairman of Shanghai Library Society, board member of Open Library Foundation, member of the Governing Board of Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) and member of IFLA Standing Committee of Genealogy and Local History.

PRESENTATION | Platform·Community·Ecosystem: Exploring the DAO Approach to Empower Open Library Services

ABSTRACT | To ensure the successful implementation of the FOLIO project in China, Shanghai Library and more than a dozen vendors, launched an Open Community Alliance, named ‘Yun Han’, together with libraries and individuals who have the same values and sense of responsibility. The alliance takes the compatibility of the FOLIO Chinese version with the international version as the first principle. At the same time, vendors are encouraged to develop various applications for libraries to meet urgent needs. Yun Han has also considered to build an App store to enrich the ecosystem above the FOLIO platform in the future.

The Chinese YunHan Community is currently facing a lot of promotion and governance problems. It is difficult to get funding and human resources from various stakeholders to support our development, and it's hard to get more people involved and have the community  pay attention to their needs and suggestions. We lack equal treatment and effective means within the community to let people who have the same values and sense of responsibility to be recognized and contribute, and rewarded from their activities.

The Chinese YunHan Community has noticed a totally new approach to overcome such problems by adopting DAO to re-structure and reorganize its business. DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization, which has an entity structure in which tokenholders participate in the management and decision-making. Its members share a common value and goal and act in the best interest of the entity. It usually has no central authority, instead, power is distributed across tokenholders who collectively cast votes. It usually needs a blockchain to run smart contracts and make sure all decisions (include all votes and activity) are unchangeable, and all actions of users are publicly viewable.

Peter Webster | Associate University Librarian, Patrick Power Library, Saint Mary's University

Peter Webster is Associate University Librarian, Information Technology Services at Saint Mary’s University, Patrick Power Library. He has an MLS degree, and Certificate in Computer Science from Dalhousie University, and a BA in History and English, from the University of Alberta, in Canada. He has served in technical and executive roles for the NOVANET academic library consortium, the Council of Atlantic University Libraries (CAUL-CBUA), the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), Statistics Canada’s Data Liberation Initiative, and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. 

Peter has presented at conferences, including, IFLA-WLIC, IASSIST, EDUCAUSE, Computers in Libraries, Library and Information Technology (LITA) Forum, ACCESS, The American Library Association (ALA). 

His recent publications include:  

“Integrating Discovery and Access to Canadian Data Sources. Contributing to Academic Library Data Services by Sharing Data Source Knowledge Nation Wide”. IFLA-WLIC Conference Proceeding 2019. 

“Canadian Data Repository Inventory White Paper for Canada’s New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization.” White Paper, Canada’s New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization 

PRESENTATION | Open Perspectives: More open data for scholarly article analysis: Changing the scholary research landscape

ABSTRACT | Open data analysist has the ability to fundamentally change and redirect the scholarly research publishing landscape in the near future.  In-depth data analysis is needed to manage this increasingly out of control landscape, of unlimited open access articles, and endless expansion.

Data is currently available, about co-author network behavior,  subject publication rates and volumes,  emerging and trending research topics, and aggregate article readership.  Data is also available to address the contentious issue of measuring article quality and value.

These days data analysis is fundamental to most commerce, public governance and policy.   More and more data about scholarly publishing is becoming available.  But, too much is still withheld by publishers or released by some but not others.  

In this session,  I will look at the changes that are called for, and the opening up of data access that is needed to more fully bring scholarly publishing into the digital age.

Jenifer J Monger | Assistant Institute Archivist, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Jenifer Monger is the Assistant Institute Archivist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. An archivist for 13 years, she's focused her career on engaging with a variety of research communities and fostering responsible collections stewardship. Jenifer balances her time between curating preservation workflows for digital archives, leading a Digital Repository Committee to unlock archival and library content from proprietary silos, and collaborating on a variety of projects to promote the knowledge and use of the archives with the Rensselaer and global community.

Brenden McCarthy | Metadata Librarian, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Brenden McCarthy is the Metadata Systems Librarian at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He began his career in a small urban public library before transitioning into academic libraries where he has always worked in systems, electronic resources, digital collections, data, UX, and metadata. He is a voice and supporter of Open Access as well as Open-source systems and APIs.

At RPI, he works in The Division of the Chief Information Officer in the Technical Services group of Library Information Services. There he strives to bring innovative new software and (meta)data technologies to Rensselaer Libraries that satisfy the information seeking behaviors of both the diverse Rensselaer community and global researchers.

PRESENTATION | Open Infrastructure: Consider the Source

ABSTRACT | This presentation details the journey Rensselaer Libraries staff embarked on, going from two monolithic proprietary information silos to a new open infrastructure with linked data technologies. As of July 2022, the Rensselaer Libraries began the migration of approximately 40k digital assets to Archipelago Commons (or simply Archipelago). Archipelago, a slim, smart, open source digital objects repository built on top of Drupal 9, was architected and now led by Metro Library Council’s Digital Services Team. The speakers will cover how Archipelago provides desired metadata schema flexibility and interoperability while being a sustainable long-term solution. Emphasis will also be placed on the ways in which Archipelago vastly improves the user experience of archival content through the system’s practical implementation of Linked Open Data, both crowdsourced and controlled, thus maximizing the research and discovery process for users. Together, the speakers share their views regarding the importance of the new user experience and integrated semantic web technologies along with other benefits, challenges and considerations in adopting an open infrastructure which was previously unavailable to them.

Yvonne Campfens | Executive Director, OA Switchboard

Yvonne Campfens holds a MSc Econometrics degree from University of Amsterdam and has worked in academic publishing and related service sectors for almost 30 years (Elsevier, Swets Subscription Services, Springer Media, Springer Nature). She was involved in collaborative and workflow solutions like ASA model licenses (1999), ALPSP Learned Journal Collection (2004) and TRANSFER Code of Practice (2009). In 2018, she started her own consultancy business and has been involved with OA Switchboard since 2019. In 2020, she was appointed Executive Director of Stichting ('foundation') OA Switchboard.

PRESENTATION | Open Infrastructure: OA Switchboard - central metadata exchange hub

ABSTRACT | The OA Switchboard is a mission-driven, community led initiative designed to simplify the sharing of information between stakeholders about open access publications throughout the whole publication journey.

It is a community of research funders, institutions and publishers, and it also provides a trusted technical solution ('message hub') to exchange metadata between them (and their service providers). It provides shared infrastructure and a standardised 'messaging protocol' and is built by and for the people who use it.

Vladimir Burgos | Director Nacional de Bibliotecas, Tecnológico De Monterrey

PRESENTATION | Open Perspectives: Open Educational Resources (OER) and the challenges in the Library

ABSTRACT | Open Educational Resources (OER) and the challenges in the Library. Recommendations for the integration of Open Educational Resources (OER) in learning environments are addressed, as well as the role of the Library as an agent to mobilize library staff as experts and natural catalyst actors to promote strategic approaches.

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