CILEA Digital Library: An on-line library service for universities and for research

Information needs in the field of sciences and research have determined the growth of specific tools (bibliographic data bases, full-text documentation, electronic journals) which are now essential for researchers and librarians. The high cost, both of data acquisition and management (hardware, software,, IT professionals, etc) drives universities and research institutes towards consortiums and shared initiatives. In 1998, CILEA launched the CDL - CILEA Digital Library Project; it aims at sharing the subscription costs to electronic journals bought by the Consortium from various publishers by hosting them on the project server which will also make available grey literature archives of university institutes/departments and research institutes. After the trial run of a prototype containing a sample of journals supplied by Elsevier and grey literature documents, we are now going to start a service based on consortium contracts - now under definition - with some important publishers and on agreements with some university departments for the on-line access to their scientific works. We also plan to negotiate contracts with some important publishers/distributors to make use of some of the best commercial services for full-text electronic journals and bibliographic databases, both on a local (consortial) server and on the suppliers' remote server. To this end, co-operating with OVID Technologies, a trial run of Biomedica Italia was launched on 15 February 1999. it is an electronic information service (bibliographic databases and full-text journals) in the biomedical field and will end on 15 May 1999. At the time of writing (March 1999) a few problems, particularly contractual ones, still need to be finalised; hopefully, they will be resolved and the service will be fully effective by the time the conference takes place.