This project has started by the Fundamental Scientific Library (FSL) on November 2011, and the main goal of the project was to start digitization of 13 peer-reviewed academic journals of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia.
The journals are:
- Astrophysics, Reports of the National Academy of Sciences,
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – Earth Sciences,
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – Mathematics,
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – Mechanics,
- Reports of the National Academy of Sciences–Technical Sciences,
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – Physics, The Bulletin of Social Sciences,
- Medical Science of Armenia, Biological Journal of Armenia,
- Chemical Journal of Armenia,
- Historical and Philological Journal, Neurochemistry.
It was also decided to digitize academic books, published by the National Academy of Sciences publishing house during 1950-1990 years. It was agreed to mount digitized materials on the open access domain of the library. The main idea is that all these materials should be freely accessible to the educators, students, life long learners, scholars for research and, teaching and learning.
As FSL is an advocate for Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) solutions, ‘EPRINTS’ FOSS product of Southampton University (UK) was selected as an institutional repository model for the journal articles. For the digitized books ‘Internet Archive Book Reader’ FOSS product was piloted as a software solution and used.
All issues of the journals and academic books are freely accessible from the FSL web page.
For digitization projects we are using 2 professional devices – Robotic Book Scanner ‘RBS TT A3+ 300 DPI base model V2.0’ obtained through the grant from NATO “Science for Peace” program (supplier ‘Qidenus Technologies’ Gmbh) and “Phase One P45 Digital Camera System” obtained through the “Endangered Archives Programme” (supplier Icam). This project by its type is an innovative one for Armenia. Mass digitization of printed materials is being done first time, and during the work we are learning a lot.
Another achievement could be ascribed as making local content accessible world wide.
Current digitization status could be described as:
For the journals. FSL staff has digitized
– Issues 2190
– Articles 34,455
– Pages 245,593
For the books, FSL in total has digitized 479,907 pages.
From the ISCO community grant funding we have obtained one server for mounting the multi subject repository for the journals, and 3 “Pentium-4” personal computers..
About our experience regarding digitization issues we had published an article in March 2012 Ariadne journal (issue 68). The article is freely accesible.