Day 2

The second day was dedicated for the visit at the Bergen University Library and to learn how it works. First we headed to Humanities and Arts Library where our guide was Faculty Librarian Ane Landoy. Then we heard presentations by Ole G. Evensen (Head of department), Monica Roos (Special Librarian) and the Library Director Randi Taxt. Their website http://www.ub.uib.no/index-e.htm

The presentations were interesting, it's always nice to learn the facts and figures of each library. I´m not going to refer all the details in them, because I believe we will have presentations online later. In general, it was rather interesting to realize that libraries in Norway are facing the same challenges when it comes to open access publishing and electronic resources in general. It is soothing to know that we are not alone in Finland! Open access is still somewhat unknown way to publish and thus not the first choice among researchers. The library must promote it more and more in the future and deal with copyright issues, we learned.

Their OA system is called BORA, Bergen Open Research Archive https://bora.uib.no/ It's based on Dspace and Dublin Core. BORA contains of scientific work, PhD, articles, books and master thesis.

The joint library system in Norwegian university libraries is called Bibsys, http://www.bibsys.no/english/pages/index.php

Other (archive) systems they use include arXiv, PubMed Central, NORA (Norwegian Open Research Archives), Sherpa Romeo and DOAJ. Bergen Open Access Publishing sounded like a great option for researchers, when the library publishes their articles online, open access.

Other facts about the library: 100 persons working, 1,8 million books, 17,000 subscriptions. What really stuck out was that their budget is rather big compared to Finland: 14 million euros, of which the budget for books is 5,8 million euros.

Likewise in Finland they had a questionnaire on library's services. The results were in the vein of Finnish results: it's hard to find online resources but the students are pleased with the services in the libraries in general. The students also ask for more silent rooms at the libraries. This sounds familiar indeed. The trend in library work is that the library education is increasing and everything is going digital and especially the social media is one big challenge.

Related to that, we saw two videos from YouTube made by the Bergen library (with the help of media students). They were really nice and professionally made - and the message was not only entertaining but also contained some basic facts on the library and the dangers of plagiarism. You can watch them on these links, they are really worth watching! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wytQ3pudf5k and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwbw9KF-ACY

This is most definitely the way the libraries should approach their customers, the students. Humor is a good way to melt the ice, but still you can say serious things better that way, compared to old-fashioned printed brochures and so on. That's not the reality where our customers live anymore, I believe.

After that we moved to Social Sciences Library and saw eg how the music department is built here. Interesting facts!

This day wasn't exception when it comes to the program. Not too early starting and 6 hours of interesting library information was just perfect amount for one day. Everything went very smoothly, no complaining whatsoever. Everybody speaks very fluent English too. This must be the best organized event I've been to on the library field!

Here are some pictures of the day 2. Some of them is especially for our music library to check out how things are here!