HERMES – Strengthening digital resource sharing during COVID and beyond Erasmus Project

Project Title

HERMES – Strengthening digital resource sharing during COVID and beyond

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Digital Education Readiness

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: ICT – new technologies – digital competences; Open and distance learning; Cooperation between educational institutions and business

Project Summary

In 2020 the COVID-19 situation forced academic libraries to move exclusively to the Web.  The closure highlighted some of the issues the scientific community had to face: unavailability of physical collections, lack of digitalization of paper assets, inadequacy of catalogues, absence of information on e-books and electronic resources availability, problems of delivering digital documents to users, general lack of competencies in searching and retrieving digital documents. To respond to the COVID emergency in the library field, in April 2020 a group of librarians under the aegis of IFLA created “Resource Sharing during COVID-19” (RSCVD https://rscvd.org/): the first experiment in free digital resource sharing worldwide.
RSCVD is based on the voluntary contribution of a hundred librarians around the world, who worked with the tools available at that moment in order to share the documents of their libraries with the world academic community.
After an initial very successful reaction to COVID emergency, now the time is ripe to put in place a multifaceted action which can create long lasting impacts.
The project promotes cooperation and partnership among 5 organizations from Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, Lebanon, Spain: a national research institution, the worldwide umbrella organization for libraries, 3 universities. Associated partners have a key role as direct beneficiaries of the project outputs. The envisaged activities are:
– a wide reflection about the meaning of Resource Sharing and practices involving the worldwide information community, fostering the emergence of a common European perspective. This reflection will lead to a publication to be disseminated worldwide and used as training material (O1);
– the optimisation of the existing system for accessing digital documents through the design of a service model supplementary to the existing one and the production of an open source management software that improves the available offer and optimizes workflows by pursuing an open source approach (O2);
– the strengthening of librarians’ skills in using the renewed service in order to provide users fast and free access to knowledge;
– a set of distance training initiatives addressed to the educational community (teachers, researchers, students) aimed at strengthen competencies in searching and retrieving quality academic documents, and related preparation of specific training materials (O3).
As for methodologies, open source and distance learning are the two main concepts underpinning the entire project, in order to widen as much as possible the participation to training activities and the use of produced outputs. At the end of the project the following results are expected:
– more effective, appealing and fast digital resource sharing system thanks to the adoption of a new open source software (O2)
– increased number of online open professional training courses available for librarians
– increased number of online open Information Literacy trainings available for the whole scientific community
– online openly available lesson plans, educational materials and assessment tools
– increased number of librarians, teachers, researchers and students of universities and research organizations aware of Resource Sharing principles and practises, thanks to the Publication (O1), the training initiatives (C1 and C2) and related materials (O3)
– increased number of university and research libraries active in RSCVD group in Europe and in the world, thanks to training initiatives (O3) and dissemination actions
– upgraded competencies in resource sharing for librarians piloting the courses
– developed information seeking and retrieval competencies for teachers, researchers and students participating to the project.
Potential longer term benefits:
– improved capacity of students, academic teachers and researchers in being connected to their institution’s educational mission through the library service which provides them with high quality digital content
– further development of the existing resource sharing network of librarians in Europe and at worldwide level, which is in line with IFLA strategy of inspiring and enhancing professional practice through development of standards, guidelines, best practices, new tools and infrastructures that support the work of libraries (IFLA Strategy 2019-2024).
Expected direct participants to training activities are in total a minimum of 100 persons, while participants to other project activities (i.e. dissemination actions) are a minimum of 2.500 persons.
Impacts are expected at local, regional, national and European level, but also beyond Europe because IFLA is a worldwide organization with more than 1,500 Members in over 150 countries. The impact will rely on application and diffusion of the deliverables produced by the project. The dissemination drivers will be the consortium partners themselves and educational institution members of the Project network as Associated Partners.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 193320 Eur

Project Coordinator

CONSIGLIO NAZIONALE DELLE RICERCHE & Country: IT

Project Partners

• MEF UNIVERSITESI
• International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions
• UNIVERSIDAD DE CANTABRIA
• UNIVERSITY OF BALAMAND