Virtual libraries in research funding agencies: an open source approach to disseminate information to faculty, research teams and civil society

Virtual Libraries lack of Open Source solutions when compared to the Digital Libraries context. The latter have a well-honed community to support these information systems such as DSpace, Greenstone and Fedora. As a solution for Virtual Libraries in Funding Agencies, São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) has developed a Virtual Library to store and index the metadata for its funded Research Projects, Scholarships and Scientific Publications. This Virtual Library is able to contribute in addressing the needs of Civil Society, which can access referential information on the results achieved in funded research (taxes); of Academia since all the metadata for scientific projects, scholarships and publications are available in the World Wide Web freely and without limitations; and for the Funding Agency’s staff which is able to analyse subject patterns in scientific research in a region and to assess the results for each ongoing/completed research project. FAPESP Virtual Library has been developed since 2004, and continues to be upgraded and updated, with Open Source software. It was created on top of the Django Web Framework, which is written in Python, uses MySQL as a Relation Database Management System, Apache Solr as a search server and other Python/Django modules developed by the Open Source community, such as Haystack, which connects Django to Solr easily. FAPESP Virtual Library achieved more than 4 million page views in 2012 and its software is now in process to be shared with other Funding Agencies in Brazil, some of them have already informed on their interest.