Reference Reviews

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf

May 2007

Title: E-prints in Library and Information Science (e-lis)
Publisher: DOIS and RCLIS
URL: http://eprints.rclis.org/
Cost: free
Tested: May 29-31, 2007

The Context

There are two repositories specializing in library and information science and technology. The other resource is the much smaller dLIST repository maintained by the School of Information Resources and Library Science of the University of Arizona. Neither comes close to the huge open access indexing/abstracting and partially full-text LISTA database that EBSCO has made very generously available to the public.

However, both E-LIS and dLIST have many documents not available in LISTA, and some which are available in both appear several months earlier in E-LIS and/or dLIST then in LISTA. The other databases specializing in LIS are subscription-based ones, such as H.W. Wilson’s Library Literature and CSA’s LISA.

Of course, there are many full-text papers available in open access databases of more comprehensive and/or specialized coverage, such as PubMed Central —which includes among many other worthy sources, all the papers published in the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association and its successor title, the Journal of the Medical Library Association, which are relevant for many librarians outside of the field of medical librarianship.The CiteSeer database of computer and information science also offers many open access full-text documents related to information science and technology.

The Content

E-LIS was established five years ago by the developers of the RCLIS (Research in Computing, Library and Information Science) and DoIS (Documents in Information Science) projects. It is partially sponsored by several agencies and institutions listed here. It has been maintained by volunteer information professionals who do know the value of metadata not just the joy of full text.

The repository is hosted by the AEPIC team at CILEA, the acronym of the Italian Inter-university Consortium for Data Processing.

The most remarkable feature of E-LIS is its genuinely international coverage. Of course, this means that there are many non-English language documents in the repository, but for many in the Spanish and German-speaking countries, the Spanish and German language documents are as good if not better (or more pertinent) than the English language documents.

There were 5,800 papers in the repository at the end of May, 2007. 2,045 of them are in Spanish; about 1,900 in English; and the rest are in more than a dozen other languages. Researchers reading Spanish, Italian or  Portuguese can at least have a good sense of the documents in any of these languages. This is not idle polyglot talk. I was an “Italianista” in high school, studying Italian language and culture, and can read Spanish and Portuguese information science literature pretty well. This linguistic internationalism also implies a strong coverage of authors from countries beyond the usual Anglo-Saxon world, especially those from Spain (1,131), Italy (682), Cuba (465), India (395), and Mexico (219). The presence of Turkish, German, Argentine, Serbian, Croatian, Austrian and Swiss authors’ work also is significant.

One third of the documents are in English, irrespective of the country of the authors, partly because English may be the official language, partly because a Danish author may have published a paper in an English language journal. In any case, there are English language abstracts and keywords.

Even for the English-only, traditional journal-oriented readers, there are enough full-text papers from well-known sources, such as from Library Hi Tech, Learned Publishing, JASIS&T, Scientometrics, The Electronic Library, Annals of Library and Information Studies, Libri, Serials Review, Interlending and Document Supply and Library and Information Science Research which would be happily delivered to users for between $40-$50 a piece by the British Library Lending Division or the few remaining other document delivery services, True, they would deliver the post-print official versions, while in E-LIS about 20% of the papers are the unedited pre-print versions. 

The list of sources are available  with hit counts. Some of the sources appear in variant spellings and/or with typos – a very common problem even with subscription-based databases.

The keywords (descriptors) are taken from the simple classification schema JITA (standing for the first name initial of its developers: JITA is an acronym of the first name initials of the developers: Jose Manuel Barrueco Cruz, Imma Subirats Coll, Thomas Krichel and Antonella De Robbio). Instead of the often artificial and outdated language of classification systems and thesauri, JITA has classification termswith literary warrant from contemporary library and information science & technology papers. Sometimes the syntax is not consistent, such as mixing plural and singular form, but this is not unusual in classic thesauri either.

The leading topics in the E-LIS collection include the following: Information use and sociology of information, Information treatment for information services, Libraries as physical collections, Publishing and legal issues, Technical services in libraries, archives and museums there are dozens of papers about censorship, rare books and manuscripts, serials management, school libraries, public relations, funding and many other topics.

Although preprint and reprints of journal articles dominate with 2,878 entries, the number of conference papers (1,295) are also prominent, and there are many other materials, such as working papers, technical reports, bibliographies, slide shows – of both published and unpublished materials. The published materials dominate the archive with 4,429 published papers/presentations.

The editorial team members review the documents submitted. This is not equivalent to a peer review by a specialist in the topic, just a good editorial measure to check that the paper relates to library and information science, but more than half of the materials are refereed publications.

The Software

The service is based on version 2 of the excellent open source GNU E-prints archiving software developed by the Department of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton to promote self-archiving.

I started with the browsing option as E-LIS has an unusually rich choice of browsing alternatives before starting to search. The items can be browsed by author, editor, journal or book title, subject category codes, country names and year of publication. The entries added in the last week can be also browsed to spot relevant items from the most recent updates.

There are two search modes: basic and advanced. The former focuses on topical searches. It  allows searching by title, abstract,keyword and full text. The advanced mode also offers searching by author, editor, author affiliation, classification codes and terms, conference name, publication title, references, year, language, document type, publication status, refereed status— far more than the typical open archives.

The output can be sorted by author, title of the paper or publication year (either in descending or ascending order). I wish that items on the result list could be marked for detailed display and downloading as a group of items after completion. The only serious software limitation that I found is the lack of exact phrase option to be able to differentiate between information industry and industry information, or school library versus library school. This is especially important in full-text searching. Using double quotes for indicating exact phrase is ignored by the software.

This service has seen impressive and steady growth in documents as well as in usage. On the first day of June there were already 2,534 abstracts viewed and 863 papers downloaded well before the end of the day. There were more than 150,000 full-text downloads in May, 2007 alone, a record number in the history of E-LIS. The most abstracts were viewed in June, 2006.

My words in this case may not have enough credit, however, because so far I have not posted my own papers at E-LIS. Given the usage statistics, and the quality of the archive, I promise that I will try to catch up with this by the end of the summer, and join many of my peers who have contributed to this outstanding resource, which apparently is of great and constant interest for many in the LIS field.

— Péter Jacsó