LVDL: the first digital thematic library on the lagoon of Venice

The Vallisneri Library of The University of Padova, and ISTI -CNR, have promoted an innovative project to create a digital thematic library called LVDL Laguna di Venezia Digital Library, in order to collect published and unpublished documents arising from scientific studies about the Lagoon of Venice. The Lagoon of Venice represents a special site for its environmental peculiarities and for its historical and artistic significance. This invaluable environmental heritage has always been subjected to many different alterations caused by man through the last centuries. It is only during the last years that many scientific projects are starting to be focused on the protection of this environment with the encouragement and funding of national and international agencies. All these studies lead to the production of a wide amount of documents such as reports, technical reviews, graduate and undergraduate thesis, that often remain unpublished and thus become difficult to trace for the scientific community engaged in the environmental study and conservation. The project LVDL arises exactly from this need of gathering all the material and making it easily usable. Indeed, different levels of document search and semantic descriptors (ASFA Thesaurus, Library of Congress Classification, free-keywords) will satisfy diverse kind of users, both specialized or not in the examined topics. As it is organized, this digital library has the potential to become a great thematic library for the multidisciplinary documentation related to the Lagoon of Venice. We propose a presentation of LVDL poster. The aim will be to describe and demonstrate the functionality of a digital library that has been designed in order to meet the requirements of specific community. LVDL is a personalized extension of the previous system ETRDL (ERCIM TECHNICAL REFERENCE DIGITAL LIBRARY) based on the Dienst protocol.