Italian Version

Initiative for the establishment of an Italian national network of Institutional Repositories of Universities and Research Institutions

DELOS, a Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries partially funded by the European Union within the 6th Framework Program, has organised a one-day seminar to promote the creation of a national network linking the institutional repositories of the Italian universities and public research organizations.

Most of those repositories are already "digital", based on various systems (e-print, Open D-Lib, D-Space, ETRDL-Dienst, FEDORA, etc.), and manage a wide variety of scientific material, such as publication drafts, technical reports, internal reports, project advancement reports, doctoral thesis, teaching material, etc. All of them are supporting also some form of a "distributed model" for the dissemination of scientific information, based on "self-archiving/self-publishing".

Digital Library technologies are now mature enough to allow the creation of a library at a national scale, providing not only access to all the participating libraries, but also additional services such as annotation, personalization, collaboration, recommender systems, etc. What is needed at this point is the willingness to coordinate the many efforts and projects presently going on in Italy, and some concerted efforts to find the resources needed for the implementation of such a network.

The main objective of the seminar was therefore to stimulate a discussion within the Italian scientific community, for the establishment of a platform providing not only access to all the participating repositories (each one maintaining its own autonomy for the organization and management of the content), but also advanced services as made available by digital library technologies. The major national stakeholders participated, as well as some representatives from similar initiatives that are already under way in other European countries.

The seminar was held on January 26th, 2006, in the Aula Magna of the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova (DEI), Via Gradenigo 6/b. For more information, please send an email to: Francesca.Borri@isti.cnr.it, with your name and the name of your organization.

At the same venue, on January 27th, was held the 2nd Italian Research Conference on Digital Library Management Systems. Detailed information on this event can be found at:
http://ims.dei.unipd.it/events/2006/ircdl/2nd-IRCDL-index.html

Programme