Assisting scientists to make their research results world wide freely available: An experience begun in the 90's

The aim of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) "Digital Library Initiative" was to promote the development of digital library technology in Europe. Since 1996, a series of research-oriented activities, mainly sponsored by the DELOS (http://delos-noe.iei.pi.cnr.it/) Working Group, have thus been organized, e.g. workshops, conferences, collaborative studies on DL-related research issues. However, towards the end of 1997, ERCIM also decided to undertake an implementation activity by setting its own digital library up to provide open access to grey literature: the ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library (ETRDL). The aim of the digital library (DL) is to assist ERCIM scientists to make their research results world wide immediately available, and provide them with appropriate on-line facilities in order to access the technical documentation by others researchers working in the same field. The prototype was implemented as part of NCSTRL (the US Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library, developed by a US Consortium led by Cornell University) and developed, extending the Dienst system, to meet the requirements of the European IT scientific community. The DL was also used as a test-bed for ERCIM scientists working on DL related research issues. The ETRDL collection consists of all kinds of grey literature (technical reports, pre-prints, proceedings of conferences or workshops available free, theses, project deliverables, etc.) and is managed by a set of interoperating servers. Pilot server sites were set up at more than half of the 14 ERCIM national labs. The first operational DL was released in 1998; after a one-year period of testing and refining, the service was available for the ERCIM Librarians and scientists and for the general public at ( http://dienst.isti.cnr.it/). Different instances of the ETRDL system with personalized extensions have been developed for the marine biology area of science: e.g. LVDL - Laguna of Venice DL - "Vallisneri Library" of the University of Padova.Includes: Conference preprint, Powerpoint presentation, Abstract and Biographical notes, Pratt student commentaryXAInternationa