[Asis-l] ERPANET Announces ErpaEPRINTS at IFLA2003 Berlin

[British Editor]

ERPANET Announces ErpaEPRINTS at IFLA2003 Berlin

In their 1999 report on Digital Archaeology: Rescuing Neglected and Damaged Data Resources Ross and Gow used 199 online references.
Today, only 32% of these resources remain accessible.  This lack of persistence remains a continuing cause for concern.  ERPANET, in
collaboration with Project Daedalus, announced on Wednesday 6 August at IFLA 2003 (Berlin) an ePrints Service for the Digital
Preservation sphere to provide a platform to address this problem. ErpaEPRINTS allows authors and creators to make their works
available at a central access point.  The service can be found at http://eprints.erpanet.org

Key to ERPANET’s rationale is the focus on the dissemination of knowledge. To date, workshops and seminars, conferences, case
studies, and an online advisory service have all contributed to widening and expanding the knowledge-base in the this sphere. Now
ePrints, with it’s sister product erpaAssessments, is offering further support and knowledge to the community. ErpaAssessments was
launched in late 2002, and provides high quality commentaries on key literature and projects in digital preservation. Now with the
addition of erpaEPrints, ERPANET is offering not only value added commentaries of literature, but helping to make accessible and
preserve the cutting edge primary literature. This service is free of charge to authors and users.

At the outset of its project ERPANET established a long term preservation strategy to ensure documents created by or accumulated by
the project would be available in the future.  Materials deposited in the ErpaEPRINTS Archive will benefit from these arrangements.

Seamus Ross, Principal Director of ERPANET, reported ‘ERPANET is extremely grateful to the DAEDALUS project for enabling us to
produce a new service that provides the digital preservation community with the opportunity to build a digital library of eprints
and ensure their long term accessibility.’

Notes:
ERPANET (Electronic Resource Preservation and Network) (IST-2001-32706) is a Fifth Framework European Union Funded activity to
enhance the preservation of cultural heritage and scientific digital objects. It is making viable and visible information, best
practice, and skills development in the area of digital preservation of cultural heritage and scientific objects.  ERPANET partners
include Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv, ISTBAL at the Università di Urbino, Nationaal Archief Nederland, Den Haag, and HATII, at the
University of Glasgow.  For more information about ERPANET events and services see http://www.erpanet.org

DAEDALUS is a three year (2002-2005) JISC funded project under the FAIR programme to build a range of freely accessible
institutional repositories at the University of Glasgow.  These repositories include published and peer-reviewed papers, working
papers, grey literature, and theses. For more information about the DAEDALUS Project see http://www.gla.ac.uk/daedalus

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Joy Davidson
ERPANET British Editor
Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII).
George Service House, 11 University Gardens,
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QJ
Scotland
Tel: +44(0)141 330 8521
Fax: +44(0)141 330 3788
http://www.erpanet.org