Introduction

Erasmus+ is the EU programme for education, training, youth, and sport. It is a well-known fact that many of the initiatives are based on opportunities for students and recent graduates, but funding and experience opportunities also exist to help lecturers and non-academic staff develop their skills through job shadowing, teaching and training activities, thereby becoming better equipped with the knowledge, skills and competences needed in a dynamically changing society that is increasingly digital, mobile, and multicultural.

Taking part in an Erasmus week is a great way to pick up new ideas and practices from a different work environment and provides the opportunity to establish a relationship and to envisage collaborations with colleagues from other institutions in Europe.

The University of Liège Library has been organizing regular Erasmus staff training weeks since 2011. As of today, eight editions have taken place, most of them focusing on Open Access for academic libraries. So far, about 200 librarians and researchers in library sciences have had the opportunity to meet in Liège as part of an Erasmus week.

Starting with the 2019 edition, the Library wanted to encourage much more active participation from the attendees. Participants were therefore strongly invited to present a session related to the theme of the Week. The underlying idea was to encourage discussion and contact between participants by getting everyone to contribute concretely to the Week by sharing their own experiences, giving feedback, or communicating about ongoing or completed projects. The 2022 edition of the Erasmus Staff Training Week at ULiège Library continued this approach.

No library can buy or hold everything its users need. At a certain point, librarians need to pool their resources and collaborate to provide access to what they don’t have. So the 2022 edition focused on services, projects, and policies that libraries can deploy and promote to increase and ease access to materials that do not belong to their print or electronic holdings. The theme was “Beyond the Library Collections. We don’t have it? Here it is!”. Some of the suggested topics for proposals were notably: centralized and shared collection storage with other libraries, long term loan projects between libraries, document delivery during/post COVID-19, challenges and impacts of new interlibrary loan policies and workflows, ILL and its impact on acquisitions policy, interfacing solutions for better document delivery, legal aspects (CDL, DRM, licences, etc.), and new partnerships and collaborations between libraries for better delivery and ILL services.

About 20 librarians, managers and researchers in information and library sciences took part to the 2022 edition. Their experiences and visions are reflected in this open access book. Libraries and the Erasmus programme have in common that collaboration, partnership, and solidarity are deeply embedded in their DNA, and the theme of the Week fully demonstrated this.

Part 1 of this book reports on various experiences related to collaboration between institutions and services in order to share collections and to guarantee preservation and access to heritage materials. Part 2 illustrates how DDA and EBA acquisition models can be used to fill gaps in collections and supply users with the expected resources. Parts 3 and 4 pay particular attention to interlibrary loan and resource sharing, sometimes focusing on experiences and workflows, sometimes highlighting successful examples of collaboration and networking. Finally, part 5 contains testimonies from libraries showing how document delivery and services have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is our hope that you will find some inspiration in this book to start new collaboration or innovation projects in favour of access to information and research publications.

April 2023