Access to Scholarly Output of Academic Staff: Bibliographic Databases and Institutional Repositories in Polish Academic Libraries

Abstract

The article presents the results of a research aimed at identifying the level and character of the engagement of Polish academic libraries in creating, maintaining and offering online free bibliographic databases and full-text collections of e-prints written by the employees of their parent universities. The websites of the 20 main libraries of the top Polish universities in 2008 were carefully searched for such resources. The research conducted in March and April 2009 was aimed at identifying their status and contents as well as the searching possibilities offered by their designers. Furthermore, the accessibility of such resources from those library websites and their in-tegration with selected global tools designed for searching full-texts was checked. The research proved that Polish academic libraries are devoted to producing and providing bibliographic databases recording the scholarly output of their parent universities and, at the same time, they usually neglect to integrate such databases with any full-text resources and are not engaged in creating repositories for e-prints authored by the academic staff. The situation seems not to be caused by the lack of adequate software, hardware or skilled and trained personnel – more than 50% of the searched libraries take part in creating and maintaining digital libraries available on the Web. It is probably caused by a professional paradigm focused on preserving national heritage and multi-step access to information, insufficient support from decision makers and financing bodies, as well as by lack of interest and pressure from scholars.