Search

E-LIS ePrints for Library and Information Science is an international digital repository for Library and Information Science (LIS) Open Archives Initiative compliant. This 21th International Conference is focused on open science this year and “Grey literature by definition seeks to make publications produced on all levels of government, academics, and business openly accessible different from those controlled by commercial publishing.” (http://www.textrelease.com/gl21conference.html) Thematic open access repositories as arXiv or E-LIS have years hosting this kind of academic materiales. E-LIS hosts documents in 22 document types including those belonging to the traditional gray literature world as Preprints, Thesis, Technical and dept. Reports, and those encompassing new forms of Grey Literature as Data and Datasets. These old and new forms of grey Literature constitute 10% of the whole content of the repository, plus another 20% concerning working papers presented to conference, congresses and different events. In addition are depositing also presentation in PPT, tutorial and learning material for almost 9%. E-LIS is completely built with open source softwares is hosted by University Federico II. After 16 years from its take-off in 2003, the disciplinary repository contains over 22,000 open access articles, in 27 different languages. All the continents are now represented, with a distribution that actively involves over 60 different countries. There are over a million annual discharges requested by users all over the world, numerous from the United States but also from China and South America. The metadata of the deposited works (one hundred per month on average) are valid by the editorial staff divided by geographical areas. The pivot on which the editorial work gravitates is the classification by country which has conferred an international aspect to the archive, aligning it with the organizational model, possibly thanks to the voluntary collaboration of about 80 professionals, including editors and interventions. The collaboration with countries ignored for years by the librarianship tradition is what has made E-LIS particularly innovative on issues previously poorly represented or considered on the margins. Topics that reflect a "different" cultural approach in E-LIS finds space, generating an intellectual growth with respect to the comparison between identity and otherness, in particular respects to the presence of Grey Literature. The studies on the bibliometrics of Indian colleagues, the collaboration with Cuban librarians at the time of the US embargo, the request to include the Maori language by New Zealand colleagues, the emergence of contents from the East of the world, the ferment of the South American jobs for Open Access are just some of the inclusiveness traits of the multicultural character of E-LIS, one of the reasons for its success. Its organizational structure of international scope makes it a model for the construction of open digital libraries, exportable to other communities. Its technical structure, linked to the OAI context and the accompanying innovative tools, provides useful services for the scientific communication circuit: analysis of log files for the production of statistics by author and for single work. Recently the connection to the Zenodo server provides the management of research data in a transparent and integrated way in a new mode to communicate LIS disciplines

Access to agricultural information ensures that stakeholders in the farming system can make informed decisions towards increasing agricultural productivity. Agricultural information and data are stored in distributed systems and repositories (using different pieces of software and databases) that expose a variety of research outputs with various metadata formats. Often grey literature, journal articles and technical reports are lost as technologies are not employed to ensure that such resources are online, accessible and shared widely within the agricultural stakeholders. This paper reviews AGRIS (International System for Agricultural Science and Technology) as an international collaboration and partnership in collecting and using agricultural bibliographic data to enable researchers and policy makers retrieve related agricultural and scientific information and data. AGRIS database, therefore, uses bibliographic data as an aggregator of locating related content across information systems available on the Web through taking advantage of the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data technologies. Besides linking related content, AGRIS has a potential to gather like-minded researchers around AGRIS content to discuss and share ideas – this implies creating a social media layer by creating AGRIS social media.

Presentation that belongs to the Course-workshop on strategies for agricultural information and new tools, Managua, Nicaragua, 8 to 10 October 2013. The course / workshop focused on interoperability issues, reusability and cooperation in the context of agricultural information. This workshop was the practical experiences of IICA, FAO, and the community of practice AIMS, a website that deals disseminate standards and best practices for information management to support the right to food, sustainable agriculture and rural development.

n 2010 FAO and UNESCO-IOC/IODE decided to collaborate on customizing DSpace. The main reasons: Both organizations support synergistic document repository communities with similar metadata standards and controlled vocabularies: the AGRIS (FAO) and Odin- OceanDocs (UNESCO-IOC) communities. Both organizations were independently of each other working on a customization of DSpace. In 2004 the Hasselt University Library in Belgium produced for IODE a customized version of DSpace called OceanDocs and adapted it to the standards of the oceanographic community. FAO on the other hand customized in collaboration with the Indian Statistical Institute in 2007 DSpace as a tool for AGRIS centres using the AGRIS Application Profile (AP). In collaboration with Kasetsart University in Thailand, FAO also developed an AGROVOC thesaurus plug-in for DSpace 1.5.2 (source code available on Google Code). It made sense to join efforts and integrate in a common repository software the best of both worlds. The customization is called AgriOcean DSpace (ODA), and integrates the previous developments of both agencies in a single customized version of DSpace.

Presentation that belongs to the Course-workshop on strategies for agricultural information and new tools, Managua, Nicaragua, 8 to 10 October 2013. The course / workshop focused on interoperability issues, reusability and cooperation in the context of agricultural information. This workshop was the practical experiences of IICA, FAO, and the community of practice AIMS, a website that deals disseminate standards and best practices for information management to support the right to food, sustainable agriculture and rural development.

The webinar presents the LODE-BD Recommendations - Linked Open Data (LOD)-enabled bibliographical data- which aims at providing bibliographic data providers of open repositories with a set of recommendations that will support the selection of appropriate encoding strategies for producing meaningful Linked Open Data (LOD)-enabled bibliographical data (LODE-BD).

Free Webinar on the use of controlled vocabularies offered to people from Sokoine Agricultural University (SUA), University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM), Ardhi University (ARU) and Tanzania Meteorological Institute (TMA) working on the project "Strengthening documentation, communication and dissemination of information related to climate change impacts, adaptation and mitigation in Tanzania". The objective is to build the Tanzania Climate Change Repository, TaCCIRe, a subject repository based on DSpace. The Tanzania Climate Change Information Repository is a digital collection of the intellectual output which is online, free of charge and free from most copyright and licensing restrictions. This repository aims at documenting and enhancing access to relevant information resources produced by CCIAM programme and related information generated from Tanzania. Through the TaCCIRe, research on climate change related to Tanzania and Africa are more visible to the rest of the world.

In the development and management of document repositories it is crucial to maximize the standardization of certain group of fields in order to retrieve the documents located in the repository more efficiently. Historically the standardization focused primarily on subject headings, classifications or journal titles. The standardization of personal names has been also partially addressed, yet it is usually limited to provide a list of the existing author names present in the own system to select one of them before entering it manually. It has been in the recent years that information management specialists have realized that the maintenance of such authority files in self-archiving information systems, such as document repositories, should be performed by the creator of the record, the person who submits the documents. During the last five years the International Centre for Research in Information Strategy and Development (CIEPI) has undertaken various services that aim to contribute in the standardization of personal names and to improve the interoperability among different information systems, like registries and document repositories, based on recognised standards. In light of above, this poster presents the latest CIEPI’s developments based on the interoperability of E-LIS (E-prints in Library and Information Science), IraLIS (International Registry of Authors-Links to Identify Scientists), and EXIT (Directory of Experts in Information Handling). The IraLIS project was initiated to address the problem of name disambiguation in Spanish-speaking countries, where the largest number of such cases appears due to the length of the signatures, the structure of names and so on. Similar problems of author identification appear in all languages, even in the Anglo-Saxon countries, due to the variant forms of name entries. Any person who studies and/or works in any aspect of science may register in IraLIS and create a record, regardless if has already published works, or plans to do so in the future. One of the principles that IraLIS promotes is that the sooner one adopts an IraLIS signature, the fewer problems regarding the retrieval of the works of an author will be encountered in the future. When an external application is asking IraLIS for a specific person using an HTTP request, IraLIS answers with a RDF/XML file (Figure 1). The data obtained can then be integrated into the client application. Other examples of use of this service is the EXIT directory, which provides referrals to E-LIS repository, such as the number of the documents deposited by that person, or the XML returned by IraLIS displayed on the CIEPI website. Another example regards the collaboration between IraLIS and E-LIS, which formally began in 2008. During the document upload procedure, when a user is typing the authors’ names, a dropdown menu suggests authorized names from the IraLIS registry. IraLIS answers the query made in OpenURL. The menu is updated automatically every night to collect the new IraLISed names. Users on E-LIS do not require to register in IraLIS before depositing documents, but it is highly advisable to standardize the signature and thus to facilitate the retrieval of all documents associated with a person. One of the main pillars for the scientific information retrieval are author’s names. The problem of the inconsistencies in the authors’ signatures has been around for many years, but its importance is increasing due to the great number of people publishing research studies and papers and the self-archiving practices in many document repositories. For this reason, standardization is now a highly relevant aspect, more than ever. This poster aims to show the existing solution described above that day by day is becoming more accepted and used by the Library and Information Science Community.

AgriOcean Dspace is a joint initiative of the United Nations agencies of FAO and UNESCO-IOC/IODE to provide a customized version of DSpace using high standards for metadata, thesauri and other controlled vocabularies in oceanography, marine science, food, agriculture, development, fisheries, forestry, natural resources and other related sciences. The best of both worlds The communities supported by FAO and UNESCO-IOC/IODE are synergistic and the standards on metadata and controlled vocabularies are similar for both. Collaborating offers the fortunate opportunity to integrate in a common repository tool the best of both worlds. Regarding UNESCO-IOC/IODE this comes from the Hasselt University Library in Belgium which produced in 2004 for IODE a customized version of DSpace called OceanDocs (latest version used is 1.5) and adapted it to the standards of the Oceanographic community. FAO, instead, customized DSpace in 2007 in collaboration with the Indian Statistical Institute as a tool for AGRIS centres using the AGRIS Application Profile (AP). All these developments are going to be integrated in AgriOcean Dspace using Dspace version 1.7. Tasks FAO and UNESCO-IOC/IODE provide the customization of Dspace in order to produce high quality metadata and to use thesauri. Dublin Core and AGRIS AP are the metadata used to assure that AgriOcean Dspace is OAI compliant and thus interoperable, that its data can be exchanged. High quality metadata have a beneficial influence not only on the visibility and interoperability of the records hold by a repository, but also on the accessibility. Still only through the use of controlled vocabularies a repository can reach the highest state of accessibility which is reached when a system search results in a exhaustive search result. Authority control for AGROVOC, the multilingual agricultural thesaurus, developed by FAO and the Commission of the European Communities in the early 80s, and ASFA will be integrated. In a later stadium Kasetsart University (Thailand) will add a thesaurus plug-in using web services for both thesauri. Finally the Hasselt University Library responsible for integrating all mentioned developments in AgriOcean Dspace, will create an Windows-based installer which will be available in April 2011. This is essential for the targeted communities, consisting mostly of smaller institutes in developing countries. To exchange information and assist the institutions involved in AgriOcean Dspace with issues that come up while installing and/or using AgriOcean Dspace a community is created on the Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS) website (http://aims.fao.org/community/group/agriocean-dspace ). Benefits The benefits of customizing DSpace in terms of using high quality metadata and using thesauri like AGROVOC are huge. AgriOcean Dspace will make scientific publications in the fields of marine, agriculture and related sciences easy and freely accessible and facilitate publishing of research findings by scientists. More specifically it will enhance the internal scientific communication and help involved institutional repositories with setting up OAI-compliant repositories. AgriOcean Dspace will contribute to opening up a world of knowledge and hopes to help to bring forth development in the fields of oceanography, marine science, food, agriculture, development, fisheries, forestry, natural resources and related sciences.

E-LIS is established, managed and maintained by an international team of librarians and information scientists. Currently it is the largest international repository in the LIS field featuring a collection of more than 11.500 full text OA documents. In the mid of 2010 the demand to revise certain facets of the E-LIS organization and operation became profound for several reasons. This revision was channeled through the seeking and structuring the appropriate synergies with experienced, as well as innovative organizations. The synergies cover a range of issues, from organizational to legal and then to technical issues. The outcomes of these synergies are expected to enhance service delivery and to increase the repository’s interoperability level. Strategically these synergies are expected to help E-LIS to safeguard its reliability and to continue growing steadily.

This presentation is based on the authors’ personal experience of migrating long-established, fully operational repositories between two of the leading open source, open access repository platforms (DSpace and EPrints). In 2010, the E-LIS repository migrated from EPrints to DSpace, while the University of London SAS repository migrated from DSpace to EPrints. In both cases the migrations achieved successful outcomes. The presentation documents key decisions and actions of these migration projects, in order to help and support decision-making by repository managers and technical advisers in the process of software migration, or perhaps just considering it.

Navigating in large repositories is a tedious task for users, even if they are domain experts as it is expected to be in subject repositories. Several knowledge organization schemas have been employed to facilitate access. E-LIS, the international Open Archive for Library and Information Science provides access to a large number of documents in this scientific domain through JITA, a Classification System of 3 main strands and 138 concepts. Being a controlled vocabulary improves precision of retrieval, whilst it helps the submitters enhance the indexing of their documents. There are many options to assist the submitters understand the concepts listed in JITA, such as to add a definition, to use info-graphic techniques or to provide a translation in the submitter’s native language. E-LIS community started improvements in two directions: first to translate JITA and second to make JITA reusable by publishing it as LinkedData. The overall duration of the project was two months and included several discussions between the E-LIS community on linguistic aspects of indexing, encoding issues, and so on. The final product is a SKOSified multilingual version of JITA, which has produced a graphical representation of the schema from a RDF file. JITA is now accessible in ten languages, which represent an important share of the E-LIS collection. The first version of multilingual JITA, named the “JITA Spring of Tulips Edition”, will be published as Linked Data by FAO, UN.

The description of three open source softwares for building open access repositories is presented: * Eprints Software * Dspace * Fedora Commons A comparative analysis between the 3 softwares. And use Cases * Agriculture & Related Sciences * Worldwide

That man is a social being is something known for some time, but maybe it is now with the amount of sophisticated means we have to communicate, when we see it clearly. In addition to interconnections, we also find advantages with the integration of functions in one product or service. Historical experience demonstrates the advantages of integration: many databases together in one online host, service Dialog OneSearch simultaneous search, portals, mashups, social networks, catalogs, collectors (harvesters), federated search ... Our comfort is enhanced if we have all at hand or, at least, interconnected. Here we present the interconnection of 3 products: the E-LIS repository, the EXIT Directory, and the IraLIS platform to standardize author names. As conclusions we can say that man has a latent need for interconnection, as we have a "hypertext" nature, and in general all the integrated services and devices are succesful, since they produce an added usability.

Three information systems serving the Library and Information Science professionals are presented: 1) the E-LIS (E-prints in Library and Information Science) open access repository, 2) the online directory EXIT (Experts in Information Handling), and 3) IraLIS (International Registry of Authors - Links to Identify Scientists), a platform intended to normalize author names according to the universally accepted format of only 2-character strings with an optional middle initial -, and a database of name variants used by each author. Thanks to the collaboration between the responsible people of these projects there have been established automatic links that add value to the individual utility of each system. The core of the system is the EXIT directory, from which automated queries to E-LIS and IraLIS, and other resources as ResearcherID, Google Scholar, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Touchgraphic, etc., are launched.

The problem of the inconsistencies in the authors' signatures has been around for many years, but its significance is increasing due to the great number of people publishing research studies and papers. It is clear that that this is important to always sign in the same way. In the case of the Spanish names, the problem is increased since * there are more choices and * English is the principal language of scientific communication, both in the production (articles, communications, reports), distribution (databases, repositories, browsers) and in the industry as a whole (Publishing houses, compilers, intermediaries, portals etc.). The producers of databases follow a standard worldwide model of signature which is used not only by the Anglo-Saxons, but also by many other countries (Nordic, Slavic, Italian...). Even the Portuguese, when they have compound names and surnames, put the surname of the father at the end. Another thing to bear in mind in the recovery of works by author's name is that the distributors of databases index the author field only "as a phrase" and not by separate words as in the rest of the fields, or by both at the same time as in the describers. Thus, for example, if the author Antonia Ferrer Sapena appears in the reverse index of authors as AU=Ferrer-Sapena, A., she can never be located searching for AU=Sapena. The IraLIS project has been thought up above all for Spanish-speaking countries, which is where the largest number of ambiguities appears due to the length of the signatures and the fact that the surname considered to be the main one does not appear at the end. Nevertheless, whilst perhaps not being so serious, problems in the identification of authors arise in all languages (even in the Anglo-Saxon countries) for which reason any person may introduce their details. IraLIS aims to be universal, for which invites Arabic, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, etc., authors to introduce their names transliterated into English in IraLIS, given that the correct interpretation of their names is also frequently conflictive. Anybody who studies and/or works in any aspect of science may register in IraLIS. Whether they have already published works, or are planning to do so in the future, they can (and should) open a file in IraLIS. The sooner they adopt an iralis signature, the fewer problems they will encounter in the future localizing of their works. We would like to present the details and the first results of the collaboration between IraLIS and E-LIS established in 2008. E-LIS is the largest international Open Archive for Library and Information Science established in 2003 with over 9,000 papers and with more than 5500 users. One of the last improvements in E-LIS is to link to IraLIS so when typing in the names of the authors during upload of documents, a dropdown menu shows the IraLIS registered names. The menu is updated automatically every night to collect the new iralized names. To deposit documents in E-LIS it is not required to register in IraLIS, but it is highly advisable to do it in order to standardize the signature and to be able to recover all the personal bibliography without further trouble. IraLIS: http://www.iralis.org E-LIS: http://eprints.rclis.org/

Established in 2003, E-LIS (http://eprints.rclis.org) is an international Open Archive for Library and Information Science (LIS). Over 9,000 papers have been archived to date. It is freely accessible, aligned with the Open Access movement and is a voluntary enterprise. E-LIS has grown to include a team of volunteer editors from 60 countries and support for 22 languages. It accepts published or unpublished documents in scientific or technical areas; authors can self-archive and a proxy service supports depositors. Metadata are set for each document type and are checked in accordance with editorial guidelines set by an international editorial committee and there are agreements with institutions and library associations in various countries. In few years, E-LIS has been established as the largest international open repository in the field of library and information science

E-LIS (http://eprints.rclis.org) is an international Open Archive for Library and Information Science (LIS) established in 2003. Over 9,000 papers have been archived to date. E-LIS has grown to include a team of volunteer editors from 60 countries and support for 22 languages. It accepts published or unpublished documents in scientific or technical areas; authors can self-archive and a proxy service supports depositors. Metadata are set for each document type and are checked in accordance with editorial guidelines set by an international editorial committee. In few years, E-LIS has been established as the largest international open repository in the field of library and information science. Searching or browsing E-LIS is a kind of multilingual, multicultural experience, an example of what could be accomplished through open access archives to bring the people of the world together. Because librarians are so involved in open access advocacy, E-LIS is a key to encouraging open access for all repositories, by giving librarians the experience they need to speak with confidence when talking with researchers and open access archives, and the experience to provide the best possible assistance to self-archiving faculty. The mission of E-LIS is to remain international and world-wide: a place where people from all over the world can deposit their documents and contribute to the world-wide dissemination of knowledge: - to improve knowledge of the building and management of open archives working practically in the field within the framework of Open Digital Libraries; - not only to promote open archives in various disciplinary environments, but also to create a valid and credible model in LIS discipline for the building of a world Library and Information Science archive; - to establish a base for communal work between librarians information technology professionals, and to enhance the Open Access movement. In the presentation we would like to expose the following topics: 1. the main characteristics of the E-LIS platform; 2. the specific customizations that have been taken place during the last years; 3. how E-LIS deals with the multilinguality and differents scripts; 4. how E-LIS manages an editorial team with more than 60 people; 5. the issues during the migration from Eprints 2 to Eprints 3; 6. Interaction ways with end users; 7. Future developments and agreements with other partners.

Established in 2003, E-LIS (http://eprints.rclis.org) is an international Open Archive for Library and Information Science (LIS). Over 9,000 papers have been archived to date. It is freely accessible, aligned with the Open Access movement and is a voluntary enterprise. E-LIS has grown to include a team of volunteer editors from 60 countries and support for 22 languages. It accepts published or unpublished documents in scientific or technical areas; authors can self-archive and a proxy service supports depositors. Metadata are set for each document type and are checked in accordance with editorial guidelines set by an international editorial committee and there are agreements with institutions and library associations in various countries. In few years, E-LIS has been established as the largest international open repository in the field of library and information science. Searching or browsing E-LIS is a kind of multilingual, multicultural experience, an example of what could be accomplished through open access archives to bring the peoples of the world together. Because librarians are so involved in open access advocacy, E-LIS is a key to encouraging open access for all repositories, by giving librarians the experience they need to speak with confidence when talking with researchers and open access archives, and the experience to provide the best possible assistance to self-archiving faculty. The mission of E-LIS is to remain international and world-wide: a place where people from all over the world can deposit their documents and contribute to the world-wide dissemination of knowledge: • to improve knowledge of the building and management of open archives working practically in the field within the framework of Open Digital Libraries; • not only to promote open archives in various disciplinary environments, but also to create a valid and credible model in LIS discipline for the building of a world Library and Information Science archive; • to establish a base for communal work between librarians information technology professionals, and to enhance the Open Access movement. The development of an international LIS network has been stimulated by the extension of the Open Access concept to LIS works and facilitated by the dissemination of material within the LIS community. These are some of the reasons for the success of E-LIS as an organizational model, which has been developed within a framework in compliance with OAI, and, exactly for this reason, it can be regarded as a tool for disseminating the OA philosophy. The invisibility of scholarship from countries so-called developing countries, such as African countries or India, was regarded as a fait accompli in the pre-Internet era. Nowadays, the discussion concerning the digital divide, scholars from these countries may disseminate their work via the networked services of digital repositories, such as E-LIS. Thanks to these projects, authors who contribute to an e-print archive are participating in a global effort by universities, researchers, libraries, publishers, editors, and readers to redefine the mechanisms of scholarly research. This e-print archive makes LIS research more visible, available, and relevant, which in turn increases its visibility, status, and public value. In E-LIS papers from 82 countries are currently deposited in 36 languages: Afrikaans, Basque, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Kannada, Malay, Malayalam, Maori, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.

An author's sign style standardization analysis per scientific area in RECERCAT repository is introduced. The goal is to ascertain their degree of awareness when it comes to sign in a so stable form over time, as best for their recovery in databases.

The AGRIS Network is an international initiative based on a collaborative network of institutions, whose aim is to promote free access to information on science and technology in agriculture and related subjects. The paper illustrates how the Open Access (OA) and the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) models can be used within the AGRIS Network as a means of solving the problems of dissemination and exchange of agricultural research outputs. The lack of adequate information exchange possibilities between researchers in agricultural sciences and technology represents a significant weakness limiting their ability to properly address the issues of agricultural development. The OA model promotes the dissemination of research output at international, national and regional levels thus removing the restrictions placed by the traditional scientific publishing model. This paper presents the possibility to address the accessibility, availability and interoperability issues of exchanging agricultural research output.

One of the fundamental pillars of the information retrieval is the name of the authors. And this is a reason why the standardization of authors names is an important aspect for the Web, and for the OAI archives. The problem is specially crucial for the academic individuals, who base their personal recognition on his bibliography. In Spain and the Latin American countries, unlike Anglo-Saxon, Portuguese, Nordic and Slavic countries, people sign writing first the family name of the father and then the family name of the mother. Moreover, many use a compound given first name. The authors who sign with their official names, very often find the unpleasant surprise that their works published in journals appear indexed in the databases, OAI repositories, citations, etc., in different forms. Thanks to the collaboration between the open archive E-LIS and EXIT, a directory of professionals linked to E-LIS, we observed the need to standardize the Spanish authors of a single and unique way. This is what IraLIS tries: 1. Creating a registry of names of authors in Library and Information Sciences, that helps to locate the different variants. IraLIS records will contain these variants used by an author, as well as those interpreted by producers, aggregators, search engines, etc., of the diverse sources of information. 2. Creating awareness among Hispanic authors about the need of always sign his works in the same form, thinking about how the international databases, OAI archives and search engines (i. e., Google Scholar) will reference their works. In the Western world languages, the signature with a single family name is already a de facto standard –practically irreversible, specially because of the English influence on the science communication patterns and on the information world (Science Citation Index, Scopus, Chemical Abstracts, Medline, Inspec, etc.)— and Hispanic authors must adapt to that. 3. Creating the simple IraLIS signature format, that will allow authors names to be interpreted without confusions by any source of information.

The current communication approaches the situation of the development of repositories that use the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for data collection. These type of digital libraries are undergoing a worldwide boom. This work studies the current state of their implantation in Spain, Portugal and Latin America. In order to do so, the existing projects in the official records have been studied using a methodology beyond the existing records of repositories. It concludes that the situation in 2006 is fairly encouraging in so far as the number of projects, but that it is quite deficient as concerns the quantity of data stored.

Established in 2003, E-LIS (eprints.rclis.org) is an international Open Archive for Library and Information Science. 33 countries are involved and over 2,700 papers have been archived to date. It is freely accessible, aligned with the Open Access movement and is a voluntary enterprise. It uses GNU Eprints software, operates within the OAI framework and employs the JITA Classification Schema. Users can access full-text documents. It accepts published or unpublished documents in scientific or technical areas in any language and format; authors can self-archive and a proxy service supports depositors. Metadata are set for each document type and are checked in accordance with editorial guidelines set by an international editorial committee and there are agreements with institutions and library associations in various countries. Its Copyright policies are recommended by the Romeo project. E-LIS is divided into editorial, technical and administrative groups. The editorial group focuses on metadata quality and guidelines. The technical group concentrates on software – its implementation, enhancement, development and added value functionality. The Administrative group deals with strategic issues including the future direction of the initiative, its policies and their impact on the user community and its connection with other scientific communities. New participants are always welcome.

E-LIS is divided into three sections: administrative, editorial and technical. A discussion list for each section provides the basis for action. The administrative section deals with strategic issues including the future direction of the initiative, its policies and their impact on the user community, and its connection with other scientific communities. The editorial section is devoted to metadata quality and guidelines. The technical section concentrates on the software - its implementation, enhancement, development, added-value functionality, and its operation within the OAI framework. These sections provide the over-arching structure within which the methods and procedures followed by E-LIS staff are established, maintained and developed. The core of the organisational model is the administrative section which also has responsibility for determining the international and future vision of the archive, keeping in mind an understanding of national and international needs. In some countries, librarians want to create national archives for LIS instead of inserting papers into an established international archive, such as E-LIS. This is understandable because there are many technical difficulties associated with the use of different languages, alphabets, and non-alphabetic languages and with the consequent problems of input, output and the sorting of data and author names. E-LIS co-operates with each country individually to decide the best solution to the technical and non-technical barriers so that international visibility can be promoted whilst national interests are served. One idea, currently being debated, is to create a service provider with a harvester to gather national metadata from the national LIS archives and which could be part of the RCLIS infrastructure. All work performed by the editorial section is developed by the editorial staff from discussion on a mailing list. Topics include metadata issues, guidelines for cataloguing, promotion of E-LIS and OA in general, and questions which arise from international co-operation. The principal editorial aim is to reflect the best practices of librarianship in each country by inviting the top scholars in the discipline to contribute to E-LIS. Therefore, the choice of editor for a particular country is crucial as they must be thoroughly conversant with the debates and personalities involved in the LIS disciplines in their country and they must also have the dynamism to promote E-LIS and the commitment, talent and patience for organising people, events and documents. Again, it must be stressed that this activity is currently done on an entirely voluntary basis, but it is evident that it has been of immense benefit to the LIS discipline as a whole. International co-operation can facilitate debate on current issues on many levels and provides the editors, on a personal level, with new professional experiences and expertise. The entirely voluntary character of E-LIS must again be stressed, as it gives a particular connotation to this support system which facilitates co-operation, promotes consensus, forms of expression and the identities of OAI group members, and nurtures relationships between different actors and countries in this wide, international community. E-LIS is confident of its progressive and comprehensive nature in technical matters and content, and particularly in the internationality of its vision and philosophy, and in its attempt to enhance and improve professionalism within the discipline. However, it is not lacking challenges, particularly concerning its budget and the resources needed for a more incisive performance, and as grants and other sources of funding are elusive, the success of E-LIS is largely based on the voluntary efforts of its members.

E-LIS (E-prints in library and information science) is an open archive on library and information science. It is an international digital library since January 2003, with the goal of promoting the open access philosophy within LIS community.

In which situation are the open archives in Spain concretly in the spanish universities, their development and future