Services

"SYSTEM AND SOFTWARE EVALUATION" TECHNOLOGY CENTER

The Center provides "third-party" evaluation and certification services in the area of Information
Technology, both for industrial and PA customers, aimed at promoting the improvement of system and
software processes as well as of the resulting products.

The activity concerning hardware is focussed on:

- Reliability prediction
- Safety
- MTBF of context-dependent systems
- Quality control
- Compliance with standards

The software activity is mainly concentrated on model set up and evaluation services:

- Study of reliability evaluation criteria
- Criteria for methodological analysis of projects>
- Models for quality control
- Software process modeling

Further information at the link: http://www.isti.cnr.it/


ISTI IT INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICE AND SERVICE SUPPORT

The service has as its primary objective the creation, maintenance, updating and operation of the ISTI IT infrastructure and support for users of the infrastructure itself.

The tasks assigned to the service for ISTI are:

- Infrastructure hardware management: procurement, planning of needs for calculation and connectivity, management of any hardware made available by the laboratories for the common infrastructure;
- Installation and configuration of the aforementioned infrastructure hardware;
- Management of services, including the fundamental ones of the institute: e-mail, mailing lists, DNS, centralized authentication;
- Design, construction and maintenance of the technological infrastructure: virtualization platform, distributed storage, integration services;
- Applications and services on demand: automation of configurations, construction and maintenance of a container orchestrator;
- Interoperability and federation with other infrastructures;
- Dissemination, technology transfer and training activities;
- Support for infrastructure users: ticketing tool for managing requests and failures;
- Documentation on the services managed by the service.

The services managed in outsourcing for other CNR Institutes and for other external organizations include:

- Services for the Pisa Research Area: management of the e-mail service, including the management of mailing lists, according to security standards.



ISTI LIBRARY & INFORMATION SERVICE

Keywords: library management, library automation, digital library, online information services, scientific communication, open access.

The ISTI Library is one of the oldest ICT libraries in Europe. It contains ca. 13,000 books and 975 serials and gives access to thousands of electronic journals, institutional and thematic repositories, bibliographic databases etc. It also preserves the ISTI historical and current Institutional Archives as well as historical archives of ISTI predecessors, i.e. CSCE (Center for Studies on Electronic Computer, born in 1954), IEI-CNR and CNUCE.

Access to the library is free to all visitors, which mainly include
Scientists and Students of CNR Research Area and Pisa University.

The Library Information Systems Group coordinates, develops and maintains the online services of the ISTI Library itself and of the Main Library of the Research Area in which it is integrated.

Most of the Library main services are delivered via the Web. The most significant ones are as follow:
- Reference and Document Delivery
- Web access to information resources: online catalogs, electronic journals and thematic databases, special contents managed by ISTI digital libraries
- Request for new acquisition
- Printing & downloading
- Internet access to external resources

Further, traditional services such as reference, loan, photocopying are delivered during the opening hours. For details see at www.isti.cnr.it/Library/about.html

Expertise
The Library has been active in library automation and automatic documentation research since the 1970s. The Library Information Systems Group is responsible for the development and the maintenance of the information system of the CNR Research Area Library. It also is currently cooperating with the digital libraries research activities of ISTI-Multimedia Networked Information Systems Laboratory in national, international and EC funded Projects.

Thus it has acquired expertise in the following areas:
Bibliography and Librarianship, Consortium acquisition of services and electronic resources, Copyright and open access issues, Definition of user requirements, Digital Library and DL Infrastructure, Distributed Information Systems and DBMS, Library Automation Management Systems, Library portals and open URL standard, Metadata standards and Interoperability protocols: Z39.50, OAI-PMH, Networked Systems, Search Engine and IRS, User Interfaces (WEB based).

The ISTI Library Information Systems Group is devoted to study and design advanced information tools for library management. The ongoing Projects are as follow:

POLAR CNR: Portal Of Libraries And Repositories.
The project has been conceived to provide CNR Librarians and Documentalists with software tools enabling them to manage and deliver services efficiently and economically. The National Project has been conducted by ISTI-CNR-Pisa and SDS-CNR-Genova.
The following software tools have already been realized:
1. PUMA-Publication Management & MetaPUB.
PUMA is a software infrastructure for institutional repositories of technical or scientific documents, user focussed, developed by the ISTI CNR. PUMA has borne on the previous experience of the ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library. The CNR Repositories managed by PUMA cover different disciplines and contain different types of published and self-archived documents. Full texts of documents are accessible according to publisher copyrights and self-archiving policies, whereas Metadata are available without restrictions. Most of the documents are in English. PUMA repositories presently contain about 5000 documents and are growing daily. Special functions are provided by MetaPub. This additional software opens PUMA repositories to the OAI world by implementing the OAI-PMH protocol.
2. MetaBook
An Information Retrieval System for the integrated search on distributed CNR catalogs. Search operations can be activated on all catalogs or on previously selected ones.

LVDL-Laguna di Venezia Digital Library and MeCME-Mediterranean Coastal Marine Environment Digital Library. The two thematic digital libraries, realized upon the PUMA infrastructure, are a result of inter-institutional cooperation. The two DLs cover scientific documentation in the fields of marine biology.

Meta-OPAC Pisano (MOP)
The system offers integrated access to the major academic, research and public Libraries in Pisa (CNR, Pisa University, Sant'Anna School of University Studies and Doctoral Research, Scuola Normale Superiore etc.).

LIBERO Competence Center
A Joint Project with Infologic s.r.l., the Italian distributor of LIBERO Integrated Library Management System, to maintain the system, host external databases and train people to use it. Services are provided for all the libraries adopting this system.

CISRSM-Interuniversity Center for Historical-Military Research
A web-portal was developed to meet the specific need for information about the military history in all its facets. The main service offered to users are advanced online interfaces to search and browse the bibliographic databases of CISRSM.

LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe)
Lockss is a model for distributed preservation of electronic collections, funded by Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, Sun Microsystem Inc. and by Stanford University. LOCKSS is open source software that provides librarians with an easy and inexpensive way to collect, store, preserve, and provide access to their own, local copy of authorized content they purchase. IEI-CNR was the Italian member for the beta-testing phase of the LOCKSS system.