General Information
E-LIS was formed in 2003 for the deposit of documents in the Library and Information Science (LIS) domain. It is the first international e-server in this subject area and resulted from the RCLIS (Research in Computing, Library and Information Science) project and the DoIS (Documents in Information Science), promoted by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and hosted on machines of the Italian Consorzio Interuniversitario Lombardo per Elaborazione Automatica (CILEA). E-LIS relies on the voluntary work of individuals from a wide range of backgrounds and is non-commercial. There is neither funding nor interest in profiting from the initiative.
E-LIS aims to further the Open Access philosophy by making available papers in LIS and related fields. It is a free-access international archive, in line with the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) movement and the Eprints movement, based on the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) standards and protocols.
E-LIS employs the freely available GNU Eprints (v 2.3.3.) software, which originated from an idea by Stevan Harnad, and is developed at the Electronics and Computer Science Department of Southampton University (UK) by Christopher Gutteridge, in collaboration with Mike Jewell (the design and development of version 1.0 was undertaken by Robert Tansley and dates back to 2001). The primary aim of GNU Eprints is to place full text documents at the disposal of the LIS community, making them visible, searchable, accessible, retrievable, and usable by any potential user who requires them for not-for-profit purposes. A GNU EPrints server is an example of an Open Archive Initiative Data Provider, created for the self-archiving or mediated deposit of electronic resources. The concept of Open Access, extended to LIS works, and the dissemination of material within the LIS community will contribute to the development of an international LIS network.
It is possible to deposit works in any language, although abstracts and keywords must be included in English, in addition to abstracts and keywords in the original language of the document. More information is available on E-LIS's submission policy and related copyright issues.
In order to get the maximum number of authors on board, the contribution policy is very simple. In a broad sense, any document related to LIS that is electronically available, in any format, can be submitted to the archive. The basic criteria for acceptance is that the document must be relevant to research in LIS fields and should be complete and ready to be entered into a process of scholarly communication. Three levels of control are in place - registered user/author; editor; site manager - to ensure inappropriate papers are not included.
An Eprints server requires authors/users to register before depositing an item; instructions (help) are provided. Registered users can deposit documents with different levels of access, in accordance with publisher agreements. Registered authors/users have an individual work area where they enter metadata and upload their documents in one of several accepted formats. The author is required to assign keywords from the E-LIS classification scheme, named JITA Classification Schema. It is a very simple schema, resulting from the fusion and rearrangement of the NewsAgentTopic Classification Scheme (maintained by Mike Keen at Aberystwyth, UK, until 31st March 1998) and of the RIS Classification Scheme, originally created by Donald Soergel (University of Maryland) for the Review of Information Science (no longer in production). The JITA Classification Schema is not intended to be a comprehensive classification, but rather to assist document retrieval through the archive's browse facility. Once the authors/users 'submit' their uploaded documents they are transferred to a 'submission buffer' where they are accessible by members of the Editorial Board. An E-LIS editor will then validate documents deposited in the buffer, adding additional metadata if necessary, before transferring documents to the live archive.
E-LIS users can both browse (by author/editor name, book/journal title, subject, country or year) and search (quick, simple or advanced) the archive. Items deposited in the last week can be viewed within the Latest additions section. Having browsed/searched the archive, users can then view the metadata associated with a document of interest, and download it if required, if it does not have restricted access.
Authors are invited to collaborate in the growth of this important project, by submitting their works to the E-LIS server, to build up a collection of freely accessible and usable LIS documents, within an internationally compatible OAI system.
We would be very glad if you would collaborate with us in the creation of this open access LIS database by depositing your works in our e-server.