Speaker
Alberto Pepe
(CERN)
Description
The traditional dissemination channels of research results, via article publishing in
scientific journals, are facing a profound metamorphosis driven by the advent of the
internet and broader access to electronic resources. This change is naturally leading
away from the traditional publishing paradigm towards an archive-based approach in
which institutional libraries organize, manage and disseminate the research output.
Within this context, CERN has been committed since its early beginnings to the open
divulgation of scientific results. The dissemination started by free paper
distribution of preprints by CERN Library and continued electronically via FTP
bulletin boards and the World Wide Web to the current OAI-compliant institutional
repository, the CERN Document Server (CDS). By enforcing interoperability with peer
repositories, like arXiv and KEK, CDS manages over 500 collections of data,
consisting of over 800,000 bibliographic records in the field of particle physics and
related areas, covering preprints, articles, books, journals, photographs and more.
In this paper we discuss how the CERN Document Server is becoming a solid base for
the collection and propagation of research results in high energy physics by
implementing a range of innovative library management services. In particular, we
focus on metadata extraction to create information-rich library objects and groupware
and collaborative features that allow users to comment and review records in the
repository. Moreover, we explain how the existing document ranking techniques, based
on usage and citation statistics, may provide original insights on the impact of
selected scholarly output.
