On 5-7 June, AUK Director of the University Library, Alla Guzhva participated in the conference "Libraries Bridging Boundaries: Challenges & Strategies for Global Openness" in Istanbul, Turkey. The meeting was held by the international organization IFLA - International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and its professional division D, which oversees the activities of academic and research libraries.
During her speech “Open Access and the New Challenges for the Global World”, Alla Guzhva focused on two important characteristics of Open Access: its ability to provide information support to the educational process and its role in demonstrating the security dimension of Open Access in the current situation in Ukraine.
"The global library community has been actively reconfiguring its operations to remote access mode since the pandemic COVID-19 for security reasons. Therefore, licensed resources in remote access mode are available, but they are expensive and require a high-quality Internet connection. Both conditions are difficult for a new university as AUK, especially under martial law, when power outages happen, and the Internet connection fails.
I want to take this opportunity to say thank you very much to my colleagues James O’Donnel and Ann Okerson for valuable advice and guidance how to build the great library in a few months using OA documents and the special agreements. Additionally, I extend my gratitude to the organizations that opened their funds for our university and the entire Ukrainian academic community - these are EIFL, Research4Life and service Rapid ILL. Special thanks to ITHAKA for providing American University Kyiv with access to the JSTOR collection of academic journals."
We would like to thank Alla Guzhva for the strong representation of AUK and Ukraine at the conference in Istanbul, as well as for the development of partnership with the global library community.