e-Science News New b-on site: Online Knowledge Library – More user-friendly and accessible New b-on site: Online Knowledge Library – More user-friendly and accessible
- 29/07/2008
The new b-on website: (Biblioteca do Conhecimento Online), has been publicly launched with significant improvements in terms of user-friendliness and accessibility for citizens with special needs. The site now satisfies the highest accessibility requirements (AAA) of the W3C – World Wide Web Consortium.
The b-on site offers more than 16 750 full text titles and reference databases. In 2007, the number of articles downloaded by users of this library was 4.2 million, while in 2006 it had been 3.6 million, 3.4 million in 2005, and 2.1 million in 2004, figures which show a very high usage rate.
Planning for the b-on: (Biblioteca do Conhecimento Online) started to be planned in 1999, at a time when the Community Support Framework was known as “The National S&T Library Network”. In 2000 the Science and Technology Observatory (OCT) carried out an exhaustive survey of subscriptions to academic journals taken out by all Portuguese academic institutions in order to obtain information for its negotiations with publishers. In 2001 the important academic bibliographical tool the Web of Knowledge, from the Philadelphia Institute for Scientific Information, was made available, which allowed access to information regarding titles, summaries and references and citations of around 8,500 journals, including entries from 1945 onwards. The OCT also started negotiating with the main publishers in 2001 and access to the full texts of 3 500 publications from 6 publishers was established in 2004.
The coordination, public financing and monitoring of the b-on are ensured by The Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and the corresponding technical user support infrastructure, and commercial relations with the publishers, is carried out by FCCN – The Foundation for National Scientific Computation.
UMIC instituted a major shake-up of the funding model and availability of b-on in 2006. Details of this are described in the b-on: (Biblioteca do Conhecimento Online) website.