Online catalogue of EU research publications, April 2004

DG Research has produced an “online publications library” of its research publications at http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/publications/pub_en.cfm. Claimed to include thousands of publications, it allows users to search by theme, title, type of publication, ISBN or EUR number. Date limits can be set but the default is January 2000 to the present, so publications prior to that date are not included. The results list gives bibliographic details and a link to how to obtain the full text. In some cases selecting the link leads to the list of sales agents where the publication can be bought. Where it is freely available, a partially completed e-mail form appears with the relevant contact details and publication title already included. In a few cases - on test it appeared to be just a very few cases - the link goes directly to the full electronic text. Confusingly on other occasions it leads to a website, which it is claimed will give further information but in practice where this happened seemed simply to lead back to the online publications library home page. Where requests for documents are not successful because the web page or e-mail address fails, users are encouraged to contact DG Research who say they will provide a copy and amend the database. It is certainly useful to have a system in place to access these research publications which have often been difficult to track down, but in the sample searches tried out many of the contacts were individuals, so it would be interesting to know how robust the system will prove to be in practice.