On November 18th–22nd, 2009, in the Library of Alexandria (the Arabian Republic of Egypt) took place the General assembly of the eIFL.net association.
Representatives of over 35 national library consortia from developing countries and countries with transitional economy participated in the assembly.
At the sessions problems of coordination of activity of libraries and national consortia concerning liquidation of information inequality and organization of the access to electronic information resources in the field of science and education were discussed. The big attention was given to the issues of expansion of the open access to electronic resources and creation of institutional archives of scientific papers and dissertations.
V.I. Brichkovsky, the national coordinator of the eIFL.net, representative of National Library of Belarus (the NLB), head of the NLB’s section of information support of innovative activity (the corporate interaction department), delivered a paper on the activity of National Library of Belarus. Representatives of some European national consortia of Europe showed interest to the delivered information. The possibility of holding of the next session of the General assembly of the eIFL.net association in Minsk was discussed.
It was announced that public libraries had got the access to the new program designed for application of innovative technologies in the field of information library service. Besides that, meetings of national consortia with representatives of different publishing houses and information services took place.
The eIFL.net association is the non-profit organization providing assistance and all-round consulting support concerning wide use of electronic resources to library users from developing countries and countries with transitional economy.
Today library consortia from 50 developing countries and countries with transitional economy of Central, East and Southeast Europe, as well as countries of the former Soviet Union, Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are members of the eIFL.net.
Mainstream activities of the eIFL.net are the development of national library consortia, support of knowledge exchange on a global scale and development of the network of continuous education, in such directions as: the open access to publications, intellectual property rights, software with the open code for libraries and creation of institutional archives with a local context.
