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

The aim of the ERCIM 'Digital Library Initiative' was to promote the development of digital library technology in Europe. Towards the end of 1997, ERCIM decided to set its own digital library up to provide open access to grey literature: the ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library (ETRDL). The aim of ETRDL was to assist ERCIM scientists to make their research results world wide immediately available, and provide them with appropriate on-line facilities in order to access the technical documentation by others researchers working in the same field. The prototype was implemented as part of NCSTRL (the US Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library, developed by the Cornell University) extending the Dienst system, to meet the requirements of the European IT scientific community. In 1998 pilot server sites were set up at more than half of the 14 ERCIM national labs. Personalized instances have been developed for the marine biology area of science: LVDL - Laguna of Venice DL and MeCME - Mediterranean Costal Marine Environment DL-IAMC-CNR. While ETRDL repositories remain unchanged, applications will be managed by the new software system OpenDlib, developed at ISTI-CNR, supporting advanced functionalities and the OAI protocol. The history, the actual services and future common developments are described.