Dear Yelena, I wish that I could you give you some answers. This is a very big problem. I addressed it very scantly in my most recent column "Sharing Knowledge: Recent Trends in Search and Delivery Tools for Scholarly Content" that appeared in AJS Perspectives (Spring 2006).
"The movement to put peer-reviewed and scholarly materials on the Internet and make them available free of charge has been around since the early 1990s and is gaining momentum in the humanities and social sciences. Institutions create digital repositories to archive and disseminate scholarly output from across many fields. Open access e-archives are usually community-driven and contain output from one or many scholarly disciplines. American scholars experience difficulties in accessing Israeli dissertations in Jewish Studies. Israeli doctoral students do not routinely submit dissertations to ProQuest/UMI, nor do Israeli universities provide a central depository for electronic copies of these works.[i] Jewish Studies scholars internationally would benefit from the creation of an electronic repository into which authors can self-archive and make available their output. Israel Scholar Works is a new initiative that seeks to serve as a "digital archive for creative work by the faculty and staff of Israel Academic Institutions and Jewish scholars all around the world."[ii] " -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [i] Although there is no central service for obtaining print or electronic copies, bibliographical records for Israeli theses and dissertations are available as a subset of the Israel Union Catalog, http://aleph1.libnet.ac.il/F/?func=file&file_name=find-b&local_base=uli02&con_lng=eng [Accessed Jan. 21, 2006] [ii] Israel Scholar Works website, http://israelscholar.org [Accessed Jan. 21, 2006] Good luck, Heid Heidi G. Lerner Hebraica/Judaica Cataloger Catalog Dept. Stanford University Libraries Stanford, CA 94305-6004 ph: 650-725-9953 fax: 650-725-1120 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Messages and opinions expressed on Hasafran are those of the individual author and are not necessarily endorsed by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) =========================================================== Submissions for Ha-Safran, send to: Hasafran @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu SUBscribing, SIGNOFF commands send to: Listproc @ lists.acs.ohio-state.edu Questions, problems, complaints, compliments;-) send to: galron.1 @ osu.edu Ha-Safran Archives: Current: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/maillist.html History: http://www.mail-archive.com/hasafran%40lists.acs.ohio-state.edu/history.html AJL HomePage http://www.JewishLibraries.org
