The “Lituanistika” database as a research infrastructure for Lithuanian studies

Abstract

The Research Council of Lithuania has been creating an international peer-reviewed research database, ‘Lituanistika’ (LDB), since 2006. The creation of the LDB is one of the national strategic priorities set out in the Law of the Education and Research (2009). The LDB helps to accumulate and preserve the best results of research on the history and status of the state of Lithuania, its society, culture, nation and language. By January 2014, LDB contained 34,247 bibliographic records, 19,059 of them with links to full text documents that are openly accessible. The best librarians from Lithuania’s thirteen universities undertake a global search for texts on Lithuanian studies. They also archive the digital versions of these texts, provided by their publishers, and make links between bibliographic data and full texts. Moreover, they derive information on citation from the text and make it public. It has to be emphasized that LDB is the only database that provides information on citation in Lithuania. The well-known products of the Ex Libris company are used for LDB data cataloguing and providing new services. Such products as the Aleph integrated library system, the Primo modern discovery and delivery system and the SFX scholarly linking service. Fedora, an open source repository software, enables long-term access to the data