This year the IFLA section Library Theory and Research (LTR) proposed a topic for the De Gruyter Saur / IFLA Research Paper Award 2015 and set the focus on "Advance research on Digital Libraries as environment facilitating collaboration, creation and sharing of knowledge".

This topic included several subtopics such as "Linked Open Data Digital Libraries", "Open Data", "Open Access" or "Data curation".  The IFLA LTR chose also the award winner and announced during the IFLA World Library and Information Congress in August 2015 that Ana Parvan would receive the prize of one thousand Euro. Additionally her paper will be published in De Gruyter Journal together with further papers from Sergio Ceron ("The Digital Library, an experience of access to information"), Sarah Kaddu ("Collaboration in Digitising Cultural Heritage as strategy to sustain"), Idowu Adegbilero ("Blogging Medical Information Sources to Users: the Case of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti Medical Library") and Iryna Solodovnik ("Towards a Central Digital Library Knowledge Space Aligning and Connecting Digital Libraries Globally"), a description of the state-of-the-art of initiatives towards a Global Digital Library and core concepts for digital libraries to be addressed. 

In this regard, one of the presented methodologies in Iryna Solodovnik's paper are the LODE-BD crosswalks that were developed by Imma Subirats and Marcia Zeng. These LODE-BD recommendation enable metadata properties as Linked Open Data (LOD) through Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) with non-literal data values by providing encoding strategies. Like this, metadata can be properly linked enhancing the quality of communication between digital objects from different digital libraries. Thus digital objects can be automatically connected to several collaborative authority platforms.

Read more about LODE-BD here or visit the LODE-BD website on AIMS.