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

The ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library service (ETRDL) was promoted by the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) with the aim of managing grey literature produced by scientists working in the areas of information science and applied mathematics, making their research results immediately world wide available and also building a test-bed for their research activities. In this paper ETRDL is described and its future development presented. Section 1 traces the history of ETRDL from its conceptualization to the first experimental service given by the early ETRDL prototype. This was implemented to satisfy the requirements of the European IT scientific community, although realized as a part of NCSTRL (the US Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library). Section 2 describes how further developments made ETRDL a system presently capable to manage DLs for very different types of literature. Section 3 discusses issues related to migration of ETRDL managed repositories to OpenDLib, an advanced digital library service system developed by ISTI-CNR. Advantages and difficulties of this migration are considered in the conclusions.