IFLA Repository

The IFLA Repository was established to collect and disseminate works by the global IFLA community. Here you can explore IFLA Standards, key publications, core documents and much more. Items in the repository are integrated with our main website, IFLA.org, as “Resources” and displayed in a separate Resources page of the website, as well as in relevant unit or topic pages.

If you have questions about this site, please contact repository@ifla.org.

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Recent Submissions

No Dedicated IT Team, No Limits: Automating Research Output Management with AI at ETRI Library
(International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), 2026-08-20) Bae, Seongjin
Accumulating research outputs in an institutional repository does not guarantee discoverability. The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) Library, part of Korea's largest government-funded ICT research institute, addressed the low visibility of its repository records in Google Scholar as a metadata quality problem rather than a search engine optimization issue. Using AI-assisted coding, the library developed scripts to inspect metadata and monitor indexing status, which improved Google Scholar indexing. Missing abstracts emerged as a major challenge, so for papers whose abstracts were unavailable from external databases, the library created a workflow combining OCR and a large language model (LLM) to identify abstract sections directly from original PDFs. Building on this work, the library is expanding automation through Codex-based agents and robotic process automation (RPA) to collect official conference and journal URLs and support the entry and verification of publication records. This case shows that libraries can achieve meaningful innovation without dedicated IT specialists or large budgets by improving metadata, automating repetitive tasks, and keeping final validation in human hands.
From Collection to Community: Reframing the Documentation of Local Wine Heritage at Katsunuma Library
(International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), 2026-08-18) Furuya, Michiru; Tanahashi, Yoshiko
This paper examines how Katsunuma Library, a public library in Koshu City, Yamanashi Prefecture, documents and transmits local wine heritage through its long-running “Grape and Wine Exhibition” and related practices. Rather than treating exhibitions and public programs as temporary outreach activities, the paper argues that they function as part of a documentary cycle through which local memories, oral history interviews, photographs, booklets, and other materials are gathered, organized, preserved, and reused, and connected to everyday reference service. The case also shows how the library makes visible aspects of local life that had long remained undocumented because they were too familiar to be recognized as records. In addition, the paper discusses how trust has been built between the library and local residents, growers, and winemakers; how local culture is translated into accessible forms for children and visitors through kamishibai picture-card storytelling, outreach, and wine tourism-related learning and the activities of Come Come Club; and how digital projects expand the reach and discoverability of these local records. Taken together, these practices suggest that Katsunuma Library serves as a curator of local memory, making local wine heritage visible, durable, and capable of being shared across generations.
Community Memory in the Age of AI: Post-Custodial Frameworks from Kula: Library Futures Academy
(International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), 2026-08-18) Huculak, Matt; Bengtson, Jonathan
Libraries have long inherited the role of custodian: keeper of the collection, guardian of the record, arbiter of what memory endures. Yet the heritage most in need of safeguarding today — the contested, the dissonant, the politically inconvenient — rarely arrives at the library's door in a form the institution knows how to receive. It lives on phones, in private drives, in activist networks working at the edge of censorship, conflict, and climate disruption. In the age of generative AI, the ground beneath such material shifts again: fabrication grows cheaper, provenance thinner, and the line between preservation and erasure harder to hold. This paper introduces Kula: Library Futures Academy at the University of Victoria Libraries — a library-based institute of advanced studies built as a transdisciplinary collider for emerging research methods. Kula treats AI not as a neutral accelerant but as a technology requiring ethical stewardship grounded in the communities whose memories are at stake. Three initiatives anchor the approach: 1. Fellowship Programs to build new expertise in the profession; 2. LENS@UVicLib is building an endowment for digitization, metadata enhancement, and AI-enabled analysis of library collections; and; 3. Liberating Knowledge Partnerships supports co-custodial collecting — most visibly through Project 35, preserving oral histories of Indigenous leaders who negotiated Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution. One might reasonably argue that the AI moment compels libraries not to consolidate their custodianship but to distribute it: to become, in short, infrastructure for others' memory work. Whether the profession is ready for that shift is what Kula means to ask.
From Transcriptions to Memory: Libraries as Curators of Community Questions in the Age of AI
(International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), 2026-08-18) Young Kang, Keun
Libraries have long preserved recorded knowledge, but not the questions patrons ask. Every reference interaction produces a question, a moment of curiosity or uncertainty expressed in natural language. Current practice reduces these questions to transaction counts and category labels. Recent studies have applied machine learning and natural language processing to reference transcripts, mainly to classify question types or improve service workflows, not to preserve them as culturally meaningful data. Drawing on a reconceptualization of librarianship as the facilitation of knowledge creation through conversation, we propose that libraries are equally positioned to preserve traces of that conversation. Patron questions, collected and analyzed over time, may constitute a form of community memory, revealing shifts in community concern and gaps between institutional knowledge and public understanding. During a pandemic, for example, patron questions expose uncertainties that published documents rarely capture. We outline a conceptual framework for question-based community memory, discuss how AI can support structuring and interpreting such data at scale, and address ethical considerations around patron privacy.
Transforming legacy card catalogs with AI
(International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), 2026-08-18) Byström, Karin; Forsberg, Asa; Nolgren, Markus
Legacy card catalogs constitute a major barrier to discovery in research libraries, as they remain largely disconnected from modern digital infrastructures. This case study presents a large-scale implementation at Uppsala University Library, Gothenburg University Library and Lund University Library, where a hybrid AI-driven pipeline has been developed to transform digitized catalog images into structured metadata information, integrated into Libris (the Swedish union catalog). To date, 770,000 holdings have been added or updated in Libris enabling streamlined request workflows, and each record linked to the original catalog image via persistent identifiers. This paper presents the pipeline which includes scanning and analyzing the catalog, segmentation and transcription of text, metadata extraction, matching existing bibliographic records, and adding holding information. We discuss methodological choices, technical challenges, evaluation strategies, and implications for research accessibility, and focus on four key contributions: (1) handling heterogeneous and historically complex catalog data, (2) a flexible pipeline combining AI tools and classic library and systems skills, (3) large-scale metadata matching against Libris using multiple matching strategies, and (4) systematic quality evaluation using ground truth and sampling. The study demonstrates how AI can be operationalized within library infrastructures beyond experimental settings, combining programming and prompting skills with core librarian competencies in cataloging and metadata.