The Library in the card : results from DECOMATE project and current developments at UAB

Abstract

The Library in the card is the slogan which would summarize the aims of the UAB Library Service in its involvement in several EC Libraries Programme projects. It refers to the possibility for a member of the UAB community to access whatever document he/she needs from his/her desktop on time. The identity card should be the key which opens his/her library without hours and place constraints. This paper would like to explain the results from the DECOMATE project one year after its completion, to have a look into UAB usage studies and further conclusions and to make the audience aware of planned work in the follow up project DECOMATE II. In a summary UAB Library Service is currently offering the UAB community (35.000 students, 2.500 academic staff and 1.500 administrative staff) access to 267 scientific journals at their wish. Articles are provided by three publishers (Elsevier Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers and the own UAB Publications Service) directly on electronic form, including the bibliographic data. DECOMATE is the modular and generic system which allows the management of authorization/identification of users, encryption of transactions, searches in the bibliographical database using Z39.50 standard, retrieval of articles PDF files and extraction of statistical usage data with postprocessing purposes. This service became operational on October 1996 with a small set of titles and after the pilot phase and optimal results, it was enlarged with many more titles in order to cover far more scientific areas. Partners in DECOMATE project, namely Tilburg University, London School of Economics and Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, with the additional collaboration of the European University Institute and SilverPlatter company, submitted a proposal for a follow up project to the 1997 Call of Proposals of the EC Libraries Programme which has been approuved. Project's work started in February 1998. DECOMATE II stands as a short name for Developing the European Digital Library for Economics whichs builds on the former experience of DECOMATE project and aims to enhance its features with the addition of. distributed searching of heterogeneous information resources within a specific scientific area, Economics, 1) access to services provided by different libraries in Europe through a single uniform interface, 2) integration of current awareness services, 3) development of an information browker module with advanced capabilities for deduplication, ranking, tracing of documents, implementation of thesauri and subject matching algorithms, 4) integration of an accounting module which allows the library to extend its services to external users with compliance of commercial providers conditions.