Open E-Resources in Libraries

Introduction

In general, electronic resources include: articles, online journals, e-books, e-theses, databases, web sites, portals, gateways, blogs, etc. Electronic resources management is the practices and software systems used by libraries to keep track of important information about electronic information resources. Electronic resources are accessible in libraries as licensed (paid) services and open (free) e-resources. We can say that other name for open e-resources is open access resources. We can distinguish OA resources (articles, journals, books, thesis, databases etc.), mainly intended for researchers, and open digital heritage (journals, books, non-book material, audio and video material, etc.), mainly intended for general public. Concerning OA resources for researchers our objective is to present the background of open access resources, different OA initiatives and software, first institutional repositories, open archives browsers and harvesters, open access registries, activities in Europe and UNESCO and personalities who are the most important advocates of OA. Concerning the open digital heritage our objective is to present the most important international and national projects like The European Library, Europeana, The World Digital Library, Gutenberg project, Google books project, Hathitrust digital library, Digital public library of America, International children’s digital library, The Library of Congress Digital Library, Gallica of the French National Library, National Digital Library of China etc.