Art. 1: Tuula Haavisto,
Licensing and libraries

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Way of purchasing material to libraries is changing. Electronic web documents cannot be owned by libraries as books or cassettes. Instead of buying ownership, libraries will in many cases buy access to web and other electronic documents. Then, provisions of use of the document must be agreed in a licensing agreement. Librarians must more than earlier learn to read contracts and the contract law, as well as they need negotiation skills. The general way to acquire chargeable web material for libraries is to form consortia of libraries. Thus, libraries must learn to make consortia agreements. It must also be decided, who and in which amounts is paying the license fees. Availability of electronic resources is one reason to say, that libraries need more money to fulfil their tasks in the information society.

Art. 2: Blazej Feret, Michael Kay,
eIFL - Electronic Information for Libraries a global initiative of the Soros Foundations Network

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The paper presents the history, current status and future development of eIFL Direct (Electronic Information for Libraries Direct) - a large-scale project run by the Soros foundations network and the Open Society Institute. The project aims to provide libraries in developing countries with access to a menu of electronic information resources. In 1999 the project launched its first successful service - access to EBSCO's databases in social sciences, humanities, business, economics and medicine. By the beginning of 2001 more than 2000 libraries in 39 countries were in the process of forming national consortia to ensure funding for the regular and continued access to these databases. The next phase of the project will include addition of science and technology (ST) full text journals, and the development of local content. The paper also describes the evaluation and selection criteria, which were used to choose the services.