Search

The article offers world news briefs related to digital information as of October 2016. Topics include plan of the European Union to introduce value-added tax on electronic books to harmonize print and ebook rates; the National Library of Israel's plan to acquire papers of author Franz Kafka after the country's Supreme Court ruling that manuscripts are the property of the Library; and digitization of author William Shakespeare's Globe archive in London, England by publisher Adam Matthew.

The article highlights the author's favorite open search tools for finding open arts and humanities content. Topics discussed include the JURN search tool, which discovers the full text of open journals in the arts and humanities; the sister tool of JURN called GRAFT, which searches the world's academic repositories, and the extremely poor semantic interpretation of queries resulting in subsequent slowing down of Paperity, a multidisciplinary aggregator of OA journals and papers.

The article reports on a 2013 decision which the European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA) made to ask the European Commission to deliver the position paper, "The Right to E-read—An E-book Policy for Libraries in Europe", which is concerned with copyright for electronic books. EBLIDA's desire to have changes made to European copyright laws which would allow European libraries to acquire and lend electronic books is discussed. INSET: WORLD OF LIBRARIES.