News

Partnership with Endangered Archives Programme for Digitisation of Armenian Rare Books

The Endangered Archives Programme has awarded the Fundamental Scientific Library with a two year grant (August 2008 – August 2010) for preservation of the libraries endangered
collections.

One of the largest collections of early printed books and periodicals in the Republic of Armenia is located in the Fundamental Scientific Library (FSL). The rare book collection is in particularly poor condition and requires urgent action to protect them and prevent further damage.
This project will digitise the Armenian rare book collections and periodicals kept at FSL and will make them available on the web.

Greenstone free/open source software will be used as a Web solution.These unique texts, pictures and atlases are of immense value for understanding the culture, traditions, political structure and life style of the people living in Asia Minor in medieval times. For more details about the project, please check here.

Two new Open Access Journals from the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia

Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia launched two Open Access journals: Armenian Journal of Mathematics and Armenian Journal of Physics.

Armenian Scientific Journals - Open Access.

More information is available at http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/services/eifl-oa/oa-news/2008_07_24_two-new-open-access

Fundamental Library of Sciences awarded with NATO Networking Infrastructure Grant

NATO Networking Infrastucture Programme has awarded the Fundamental Scientific Library of Armenia with a grant to enable the harmonization of the Academy of Sciences network infrastructure with GEANT, a multi-gigabit pan-European data communications network, reserved specifically for research and education use. In order to do so, local telecommunication hardware and the fiber optic network will be upgraded and the 29 research libraries of the National Academy of Sciences will be modernized greatly with computers and other networking equipment. This measure intends to address the dramatic lack of computers in libraries in the country. By way of illustration, as of today, the library of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography is the only one out the 29 libraries to have but 1 Pentium computer. In addition, the grant will include training courses for librarians and other user groups on accessing and benefit from eIFL and other resources.

The expected results of the project are to improve the telecommunications infrastructure in Armenia, revitalize and modernize the library network in the member institutions of the Academy of Sciences, get in line with European library management standards, and be able to access to world digital resources, services and scientific information. In parallel, the participating libraries will get involved in the digitization activities that the Fundamental Scientific Library is conducting currently.

The project is jointly coordinated by Alan Hopkinson, of Middlesex University, from the side of NATO partner country and Tigran Zargaryan from the Armenian side.

Portal of the Armenian Digital Library launched

Since January 2007 the Fundamental Scientific Library of Armenia has been carrying out a series of activities to introduce Open Source Software solutions to the academic community, librarians, students and library users. Within this framework, the leading scientific institution in the country, the National Academy of Sciences, is building a repository with the goal of enabling access to the wealth of its scholarly literature. The portal of such digital repository uses Greenstone open source software and has recently gone public. As a result of this initiative, the annonated abstracts of the Academy's 13 journals, whose publication started as back as the 1940s, covering all aspects of Science, Technology and Medicine alongside other publications will be available. The portal is open to all Armenian research institutions that are willing to participate and a special software to convert the bibliographic data into the Greenstone format has been developed.

Developing a new scholarly communication system based on Open Access

The Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation in Armenia has granted the Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) with a one year grant to develop an Open Access based scholarly communication system for the national academic community.

The Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences is the main and largest repository of scholarly publication in the Republic of Armenia. The National Academy of Sciences houses 29 research institutions and is an overall leading producer of scientific content. Eighteen NAS libraries are members of the eIFL-supported Electronic Consortium of Armenia ELCA, (http://www.elca.am), whose main objective is to ensure and enhance access to online scientific journals to libraries, universities, research and other non-commercial organizations. However the National Academy of Sciences publishes 13 peer-reviewed journals with an international reputation, partners in different EU and US funded research projects, and a supercomputing GRID infrastructure is operating, academic institutions are not yet well prepared for the challenges of the knowledge society and scientists are not familiar with the modern trends on scholarly communication.

The Open Society Institute has been supporting the implementation of digital technologies in Armenia in the last years and this new project will seek to raise awareness and encourage alternative solutions to the traditional system of scholarly communication based on peer reviewed academic journals by commercial publishers. The grant period will run through the whole 2008 and will look into Open Access publishing procedures, institutional repositories and self-archiving toolsets for the local research community. In addition, the project will publish 12 issues of an electronic journal mainly focused on Mathematics and Physics. Tigran Zargaryan, director of the Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences, will coordinate the project.

Open Access briefing paper also available in Armenian

The short briefing paper on Open Access prepared by Key Perspectives is a useful resource to understand what Open Access is and what it is not. eIFL has encouraged the translation of this work in the local languages within its network. The latest contributions have been kindly made by the Armenian and Bulgarian library consortia which add to the translations into Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Macedonian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian that can be downloaded from http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/openaccessarchive/briefingpapers.html