Dear all,

We are very happy to announce that we can start a LIBER working group for FIM4L. As many of you know, we were looking for an umbrella for FIM4L since its start, and we’re happy to share LIBER has agreed to be just that for the next year (at what time both parties will evaluate the fit). LIBER is a solid EU research library association (450 libraries) and we're glad that they will now provide a platform to work towards our goal.

Thanks to the work of Peter G., Jiri and Raoul, and also Birgit Schmidt (cc, Chair of the Steering Committee for Research Infrastructure, LIBER) we can start this working group.

What are our plans so far?

The LIBER working group FIM4L will work for a year (until end 2020) and the following deliverables are planned:

FIM4L Guidelines and Recommendations
Liaise with other initiatives (IFLA etc.) and cooperate with activities such as SeamlessAccess.org
Identify and describe good practice examples, and integrate these into the guidelines
Presentation of the guidelines and discussion/prioritization of the recommendations
Promoting the best way of using FIAM/SSO technologies while preserving patron privacy

The idea is to publish our Guidelines and Recommendations as an IFLA standard.

As both FIM4L and LIBER recognize the work FIM4L has planned could benefit libraries all over the world, and as our FIM4L community also consists of many non-European members, we think that it would be beneficial to make any recommendations be acceptable around the globe and that it would be beneficial to have global coverage in the governance body of FIM4L. Thus FIM4L has already commenced talks with IFLA as they have a global scope.

We are also happy to see our email listserv has grown to +50 members. We appreciate your valuable collaboration and are looking forward to move on as a global initiative.

Furthermore:

Caroline Checkley (University of Essex) represents FIM4L in the JISC UKFAM group.
I have been asked to join the (post RA21) SeamlessAccess Coalition and have accepted. In the coalition I will represent FIM4L. The coalition is heading the same way concerning attribute release. We are looking forward to cooperating with them, sharing libraries' concerns.

Kind regards,

Jos

Jos Westerbeke