Corporate Librarianship in the ODINECET Group (EURASLIC)

Abstract

This paper focused on the advantages of joint librarian projects and international collaboration among the aquatic libraries, which are highly specialized. One of the outstanding features of the information environment during the last decades is the constant growth of e-libraries, or even separate digital collections. Nowadays any library is willing to expand the sphere of its informational activities either within the country or abroad; librarians attract users by promoting their services and providing (open) access to their collections via digitization. In so doing, libraries are more productive, useful and user-friendly. Libraries are becoming more integrated into the world of e-science via various international programs. Examples of certain successful international librarian partnerships are given. There have already been two institutional repositories (IBSS, Sevastopol, Crimea, and RuFIR, Russian Fishery Industry Repository, Moscow, Russia) and one corporate repository CEEMaR, launched as part of the ODINECET Program. The

67 paper emphasizes the pluses and minuses of the CEEMaR e-Repository, the IODE product of joint efforts of 18 libraries from five countries of the Central and Eastern Europe Region, against institutional repositories. Besides Open Access resources, worldwide corporate cooperation has brought document cataloguing to a completely different level. Electronic versions of bibliographic information has stimulated the creation of new forms of collaboration in bibliographic data exchange, leading to making the cataloguing process cheaper, raising the issue of quality control while compiling a bibliographic record, and uniting the libraries in their mutual efforts to create regulating documents of the international standards. The Union Catalogue of the ODINECET Group is a common corporate resource, gathering information on the aquatic periodicals’ holdings from the Central and Eastern Europe libraries. The works (either factual or technical) have also revealed some problems that are yet to be solved, with a unique cataloguing standard among them. The challenging task for catalogue compilers will be to unite certain bibliographic metadata modes, classification descriptors and keywords. Current activities and future perspectives of the ODINECET Union Catalogue are reported on.