Antonella de Robbio

There are many, many heroes and leaders in the open access movement, around the world, including many librarians. Indeed, there cannot be too many: for open access to succeed, we all need to share. We need advocates and implementers in every country, every university, every association, every funding agency - and more. With profuse apologies to the many heroes and leaders who have not yet received the recognition deserved, let us make a start by linking to our works, and making a few introductions.

At the recent OAI4 and first E-LIS workshop, it was my great pleasure to meet for the first time the dynamic, hard-working, brilliant - and very kind - Antonella de Robbio.

Antonella is the originator and current site manager of E-LIS, an open access archive for documents in Librarianship, Information Science and Technology, and related areas, based on GNU e-prints technology, and hosted by the AEPIC team on computers belonging to the CILEA group. Formed in 2003, E-LIS is the first international e-print server in this subject area. In two short years, E-LIS has grown to include a completely volunteer editorial team from 41 countries (so far), with at least one editor in each country. E-LIS now includes close to 3,000 documents, and usage is beginning to rise substantially, as reported by Andrew Waller the other day, as awareness of E-LIS begins to grow. Papers and presentations from the first Workshop on e-prints in Library and Information Science, October 22, 2005, are available.

As the Co-ordinating Manager at the Library System of the University of Padova, one of Antonella's roles is as a member of the Italian Open Access Group (remember the Messina Declaration? To quote a message by Antonella on the rclis list: "On November 4th-5th 2004 thirty-two Italian universities (more than 40% of the Italian universities) gathered in Messina, Sicilia (Italy) to sign the "Messina Declaration", and committed to sign the Berlin Declaration".

Antonella also coordinates the Working Group for the Implementation of E-prints archives at the University of Padua, and recently brought forward an Open Access resolution to UNESCO. Naturally, Antonella's writings can be found through an E-LIS search (81 documents as of today, in Italian and English - not bad at all for a '98 grad of the Master in Library Management program at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan).

Keep up the good work, Antonella! - and, may the rest of us have a fraction of your energy.

Watch for future articles on OA Librarian about other librarian OA leaders, including others on the E-LIS team, as well as DLIST's Anita Coleman. If you know someone whose work deserves to be highlighted, or if you would to see a link to your own work on OA Librarian, please contact one of the blog team members.


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