The Driver’s Guide is a practical guide for repository managers and institutions who want to build their own repository.

It is widely acknowledged that a common knowledge base for European research is necessary. Research repositories are an important innovation to the scientific information infrastructure. In 2006, digital repositories in the 27 countries of the European were surveyed, covering 114 repositories from 17 European countries. In follow-up, this book presents the results of the 2008 survey. It shows an increasing number of respondents, but also a further diversification in the character of a repository. Repositories may be institutional or thematically based, and as such non-institutional as well. 178 Institutional research repositories and 14 thematic and other noninstitutional repositories from 22 European countries took part actively. European practices should be harmonized and the development of state-of-the-art technology facilitated. Authors, institutes and information users are stakeholders in this process. In presenting a state-of the art of developments, this book is a valuable guide for them in developing their policy on research repositories without losing contact with others. The ongoing process of widespread and diversification of digital repositories puts urgency on coherent approach, as a basic feature of repositories is the retrievability of information that may be dispersed over many of them. Continued monitoring of developments will be necessary.

The inventory study investigates the current state of digital repositories for research output in the European Union, with the goal of identifying the next steps to stimulate an infrastructure for digital repositories at a European level. It is part of the EU-financed DRIVER project, or Digital Repositories Infrastructure Vision for European Research, which aims to create a knowledge base for European research.

Emerging Standards for Enhanced Publications and Repository Technology serves as a technology watch on the rapidly evolving world of digital publication. It provides an up-to-date overview of technical issues, underlying the development of universally accessible publications, their elemental components and linked information. More specifically it deals with questions as how to bring together the communities of the Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and the Common European Research Information Format (CERIF). Case studies like EGEE, DILIGENT and DRIVER are analyzed, as well as implementations in projects in Ireland, Denmark and The Netherlands. Interoperability is the keyword in this context and this book introduces to new standards and concepts used in the design of envelopes and packages, overlays and feeds, embedding, publishing formats and Web services and service-oriented architecture. It is a must-read for quick and comprehensive orientation.

This book brings together international experience of business planning for digital libraries: the business case, planning processes, costs and benefits, practice and standards, and comparison with the traditional library. Although there is a vast literature already on other aspects of digital libraries, business planning is a subject that until now has not been systematically integrated in a book. Digital libraries are being created not only by traditional libraries but also by museums, archives, media organizations, and any institution concerned with managing scientific and cultural information. Business Planning for Digital Libraries is designed for practitioners in the cultural and scientific sectors, for students in information sciences and cultural management, and in particular for people engaged in managing digital libraries and repositories, in electronic publishing and e-learning, and in teaching and studying in these fields.

Digital technology has made culture more accessible than ever before. Texts, audio, pictures and video can easily be produced, disseminated, used and remixed using devices that are increasingly user-friendly and affordable. However, along with this technological democratization comes a paradoxical flipside: the norms regulating culture's use - copyright and related rights - have become increasingly restrictive. This book brings together essays by academics, librarians, entrepreneurs, activists and policy makers, who were all part of the EU-funded Communia project. Together the authors argue that the Public Domain - that is, the informational works owned by all of us, be that literature, music, the output of scientific research, educational material or public sector information - is fundamental to a healthy society. The essays range from more theoretical papers on the history of copyright and the Public Domain, to practical examples and case studies of recent projects that have engaged with the principles of Open Access and Creative Commons licensing. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the current debate about copyright and the Internet. It opens up discussion and offers practical solutions to the difficult question of the regulation of culture at the digital age.

The traditional publication will be overhauled by the ‘Enhanced Publication’. This is a publication that is enhanced with research data, extra materials, post publication data, and database records. It has an object-based structure with explicit links between the objects. In this book a state-of-the-art overview is given of the structural elements of an Enhanced Publication, as well as publication models, interrelationship and repository issues. The use of Enhanced Publications evokes questions on object models and functionalities. In-depth study is made of these subjects. More practically, a sample is given of datasets together with a demonstrator-project. In the final section, this book deals with long-term preservation issues, linking to the developments of digital repositories that are studied in other books in this series.