GEO: a special collection for Earth Science community

Around 1960, the CNR Institute for Geoscience and Earth Resources (IGG) began to collect a bibliography of its discipline. The work method was based on the analysis of leading technical and research papers produced in the fields of applied research of geothermal energy, hydrogeology, geology, environmental geochemistry, containment of greenhouse gases, the volcanology and geophysics. The bibliography, still growing, collects descriptions of works by researchers of IGG and by national and international experts belonging to the same community. The library staff of IGG checked the indexes of print journals and conferences in subscription at the institute IGG library and the Current Contents indexes in order to select the most relevant works. The search method was based on specific keywords and descriptors. After the selection, authors of selected papers were asked for a free copy of their papers. Through the collaboration with national and international institutions also grey materials such as technical and project reports has been collected. All the documents described in the bibliography have been archived in paper copy at IGG. About five years ago, there started a Project to create a Digital Library (DL) of all the documents corresponding to the bibliography items. This DL, named GEO, was born in collaboration between IGG and the CNR Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI). Its objective is to collect, disseminate and promote the visibility and use of its contents not otherwise accessible. The technology of GEO is a special instance of the PUMA DL http://puma.isti.cnr.it. PUMA, developed by ISTI, was born to manage institutional repositories. It presently supports 51 CNR collections that contain about 34000 documents covering different disciplines. Repositories and collections are growing daily. The system functionalities are oriented to meet the requirements of CNR researchers allowing them to easily self-archive documents of different nature and to manipulate the stored content to fulfill scientific and administrative issues. PUMA also ensures the preservation of the documents and provide worldwide easy web access. GEO manages two distinct collections: the IGG Institutional repository and the Geo-db, i.e., the repository containing documents by external scientists. The two repositories are managed separately by the system but can be viewed and searched as a unique collection through a common user interface. Presently GEO is operating and the digitization of the historical documents is daily growing. GEO is available at http://geo.isti.cnr.it/. Future targets are: i) discovering and digitizing the greatest number of grey materials as possible; ii) linking the scientific contents to related resources such as database of rough data; iii) linking documents to related Projects, if any; iv) linking repositories of the same discipline in order to create a knowledge based network in Earth Science. We believe that GEO is a good contribution to create the wealth knowledge to support Earth Science scientific community. We hope that the endemic shortage of funds and human resources does not slow down too the achievement of our target.