55th General Assembly held

The 55th General Assembly of the Japan Association of National University Libraries was held at Sendai International Center (Sendai) on June 26, 2008 hosted by Tohoku University Library.
After the opening address by Professor Kazuhiko Saigo, President of JANUL, the greeting from Professor Akihisa Inoue, President of Tohoku University and Professor Keiichi Noe, Director of Kyushu University Library. Before the proceedings, Professor Saito, Director of Hitotsubashi University Library and Professor Aoki, Director of Miyagi University of Education Library were nominated for the chairperson and the vice-chairperson, respectively.

In the proceeding, there was firstly the progress report of the Association's activities after the 54rd General Assembly last June.
Then the following issues were discussed: the proposed business plans for FY2007; modification of the nomination process of the directors and their term; dividing the Hokushin'esu Regional Association; the proposed budget for FY2008; and so on.

And there were the reports of the Symposium "Reforming the Scholarly Information Distribution" held on May 1st, and of the request to NII in November 2007 on the new NACSIS system and its response. Next, Mr. Yorihiko Katsuno, Director of Information Division, Research Promotion Bureau, MEXT explained the recent moves about national universities, the moves about the activities of the Subdivision on Science, Council for Science and Technology, the recent moves about scholarly information infrastructures, and so on.
In the afternoon, workshops was held and the following two topics were discussed actively; A: What should libraries do to enhance the support of study and education; B: Reform of the scholarly information distribution toward the continuous access to e-journals.In the topic A, the case studies that focus on the library's role as "Place" of study and campus life such as "Learning Commons" set up based on a quite new concept was reported, and an active discussion was done on the plan to enhance the support of study and education which university libraries should work on. In the topic B, a lively and frank discussion was done on tasks with which university library should grapple as the party to the scholarly information distribution to establish a sustainable distribution system of the scholarly information such as e-journals. The cooperation with parties concerned such as the university, the researcher, the academic society, the publisher, and the MEXT, and the promotion of the institutional repository are discussed as the such tasks.