Lithuanian Academic Electronic Library eLABa

The Lithuanian Academic Electronic Library (eLABa), as a national aggregated open access (OA) repository, in accordance with its legal regulation, was started in the end of 2006.

The main goals of eLABa creation were development of the environment and tools, allowing preparation, collection, long-term preservation, and permitting access to research and study e-documents, created in Lithuania.

Functioning of the eLABa is based on the usage of the Fedora repository software and infrastructure, allowing collections and storage of various e-objects concerning science and studies of different types and access to their metadata for the search systems using the OAI-PMH protocol in popular metadata standards, e.g. DC, MARC 21.

eLABa consists of 6 science (art) and study e-document collections: ETD (bachelor and master theses, doctoral dissertations and their summaries); Journals (periodic or one-time reviewed scientific and popular journals and other publications); Books (monographs, manuals, teaching books, their parts and others issues of science and studies); Proceedings (reports at scientific or methodological conferences, seminars and other scientific and educational events); Working Papers (research, development activities and project reports, and other research and study materials, prepared in e-form); Empirical Data (empirical data of research in humanitarian and social sciences). The largest collection of the full-text e-documents stored in the eLABa repositories is ETD collection. Also there is a big Journals collection. The other eLABa collections are much smaller. Formation of new eLABa collections, which can be important for researchers, teachers and students, e.g. collection of e-teaching objects, are foreseen in the near future.

The innovative architecture of eLABa allows participation in the international European and worldwide OA projects, such as NDLTD, DRIVER, DART-Europe, PEER, OpenAIRE.