LV and MeCME Digital Library: two open doors to the aquatic sciences documentation

The world of web communication offers new opportunities to scientific communities making it possible to easily share information and documentation on their own scientific studies and research by implementing open access disciplinary and thematic repositories, able to overcome linguistic diversity and geographic distances. The Vallisneri Library of the University of Padova, the Costal Marine Environment Institute of Taranto and the Institute of Science and Information Technologies of the Italian National Research Council have started a collaboration in order to promote the exchange and dissemination of aquatic sciences information and to give open access to the results of the research activities. Two Digital Libraries have been created by the three Institutions in order to collect documents such as reports, technical reviews, graduate and undergraduate thesis, that often remain unpublished and thus become difficult to trace for the scientific community engaged in the environmental study and conservation: the first, a digital thematic library called LVDL Laguna di Venezia Digital Library, collecting published and unpublished documents arising from scientific studies about the Lagoon of Venice; the second, created following the example of LVDL and the prototype pattern, called MeCME Mediterranean Costal Marine Environment Digital Library collecting multidisciplinary documents concerning scientific studies in the Mediterranean Costal areas and in particular the Southern one, including specific studies on the Taranto Gulf. Both the DLs cover up similar fields of interest and classify the documents according to the same semantic descriptors (ASFA Thesaurus, Library of Congress Classification, free keywords). Both the DLs, hosted on a CNR server in Pisa, are a personalized extension of the previous system (ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library http://dienst.isti.cnr.it ) based on the Dienst protocol of the Cornell University-US.