National Cooperation Department

New roles for the National Library

Since 1988 the National Library (KB) has been responsible for coordination and development initiatives involving the research libraries of Sweden. This assignment, from the Ministry of Education and Research, includes:

• the developing and running of LIBRIS´ library systems
• analysing the development for Swedish research libraries 
• national license agreements for electronic resources
• open access
• competency
  

Since January 1st 2011 KB has an extended task from the Ministry of Culture to have overall responsibility for all publically funded libraries in Sweden. This new assignment infers that KB as a governmental authority now is responsible for:

• conducting national overview
• promoting cooperation
• driving development forward and monitoring all public libraries.
• library statistics

Tasks since before for research libraries (Ministry of Education and Research)

Libris-systems, Inter-library loan and resource sharing activities, Open Access, BIBSAM library consortia for licensing e-resources, Competence issues, Quality development, metadata, national digitizing issues, standardization, funding projects.

Tasks added from 2011 (Ministry of Culture)

Conduct national overview and promote cooperation, collaboration with regional libraries to monitor the design and implementation of plans for library services that the local authorities and regions have adopted pursuant to the Swedish Libraries Act, subsidy to Swedish repository library, parts of the International library in Stockholm and the three government funded information- and lending centers, official library statistics.
To carry out this task for national cooperation, the National Library has created an influence structure with a main advisory committee and an additional number of expert groups and steering committees:

• Expert group on Information supply and Resource sharing
• Expert group on Metadata
• Expert group for Digitization
• Expert group on Education and Learning
• Expert group for Evaluation and Quality
• Expert group for Professional Development
• Steering committee for the BIBSAM Consortium
• Steering committee for OpenAccess.se
• Steering committee for LIBRIS National Infrastructure

The National Library also hosts an annual meeting for all Swedish libraries and related parties where joint strategic and developmental issues are discussed.

At KB there are two departments working side by side with this:

Coordination and Development Department

Libris Department

Coordination and Development Department

National and International Cooperation

The department supports interlibrary lending by compensating libraries for outgoing loans. We promote cooperation among research libraries, public libraries, and other publicly funded libraries.

E-licensing

We negotiate (on behalf of the BIBSAM consortium) national license agreements for access to thousands of electronic information resources. Swedish university libraries, university college libraries and libraries of non-academic public research institutions are eligible to join the agreements.

OpenAccess.se

The program promotes Open Access to the works produced by researchers, teachers and students. It supports the development of digital repositories as well as Open Access journals at Swedish institutions of higher education.

Supporting Library Development

The National Library works with coordination and development, and performs studies and evaluations. We also fund projects to promote information provision to research and higher education.

Within the coordination and development initiative we also coordinate parts of the continuing education for librarians in Sweden, in cooperation with a number of different parties. The National Library provides library statistics for Swedish research- , public-, hospital- and school libraries.

In collaboration with regional libraries we monitor the design and implementation of plans for library services that the local authorities and regions have adopted pursuant to the Swedish Libraries Act. The National Library also subsidy to Swedish repository library, parts of the International library in Stockholm and the three government funded information- and lending centers.

The Libris Department

The National Library is responsible for the maintenance and systems development of Libris national library systems - focusing the areas search services, cataloguing and interlibrary lending.  Libris national library systems are built upon cooperation between the participating libraries.

Libris is the union catalogue for Swedish libraries, today mostly academic and research libraries, but all libraries are welcome to participate. A further development of Libris as a base for a national catalog is part of the assignment for the National Library.

We actively work with making the Libris services as open as possible and with promoting openness in libraries. LIBRIS bibliographic data is published as Linked Open Data.

LIBRIS (WebSearch) offers free access to 7 million titles held at 170 Swedish libraries.

SwePub provides references to academic publications registered in Swedish university publication databases.

With Sondera you can carry out a simultaneous search in the national union catalogue LIBRIS, in the database for the Swedish archives, NAD, and in the Swedish Media Database, SMDB.

The Samsök service, with about 40 participating research libraries, gives users a single point of entry to their own library’s electronic material and facilitates access and administration.

More than 1,700 libraries use the LIBRIS Interlibrary routine that makes it possible to order publications not accessible in their home library.

The Swedish Dewey

As of 1 January 2011 the National Library of Sweden use the Dewey Decimal Classification system and The Swedish Dewey editorial office is located at the Libris Department.