Abstract. The University of Porto has a well-established set of specialized libraries serving the research and student population of its 14 schools. Thematic digital libraries can be valuable for organizing specific collections and for supporting emergent communities. This work focuses on two case studies, one in the area of the Fine Arts and the other in the area of Food and Nutrition. For building both digital libraries we propose to use the existing university repository infrastructure and to establish a metadata workflow that makes use of available descriptions in the library catalogues and in the university information system. We expect that such an approach, which takes into account the institutional context and resources, can be used in other collections at our university and inspire similar initiatives elsewhere.Keywords: metadata integration, institutional repositories, DSpace, digital libraries, description and cataloguing.
Thematic Digital Libraries at the University of PortoThe University of Porto is the largest Portuguese university, serving a population of over 28,000 students and covering research areas that range from the humanities, social sciences, fine arts, architecture, economics and business studies to science, engineering, medicine, sports and law. The university currently has three information systems that handle bibliographic records. The online library catalogues, managed with the Aleph system, are used for cataloguing, acquisition, loan and administration. The university information system developed on the in-house SIGARRA technology [1] includes the publications module used by the research community to deposit scientific publications, which are then validated by the library services. The university repository, built on the DSpace platform [2], is intended to manage and give open access to the scientific production of the university.Our goal is to create thematic collections of digital objects, in the form of digital libraries, taking into account the information management context in the university and reusing existing bibliographic descriptions. This will guarantee quality descriptions in the libraries, avoid duplicate description, and use the technological support of an existing repository service. We build on earlier work concerning integration platforms and the extension of institutional repositories [3,4] and create specific procedures for metadata integration.