Setting Up a Digital Library for LARES

Under the umbrella of IRES the continental real estate associations have been taking care of “local exchange” predominantly by way of annual conferences. However, the issue of long-term access regarding previous publication output and opportunities for cross-referencing is of interest to the worldwide real estate community. In other words, maintaining an archive and giving access to already published entities is enhancing attention. The European Real Estate Society has since a number of years taken care of a Digital Library, which delivers unrestricted open access to the output of previous annual conferences, industry and education seminars. As the ERES-history goes back till 1993, some materials had to be retrospectively back-digitized, when setting up this library (http://library.eres.org). The complete collection allows to trace back the "collective memory" of the association and to see, how the attention towards different topical areas has shifted and progressed in the course of time. The starting point for this LARES Digital Library is to disseminate published output in a similar way and to make it available in the same framework as the ERES Digital Library. In this regard, first of all previous proceedings were collected, followed by metadata extraction & cleaning of the datasets. In order to enhance the visibility of the individual entries, also DOI's were attached and the published data cross-referenced in RePEc. Overall nearly 700 entries have been recorded for the period 2004-2018 and these can be accessed via http://http://lares.architexturez.netIn the framework of this presentation, multilingual issues will be addressed along with trends in topical areas of the archived period of time. Furthermore, the concept of extension with other continental digital libraries will be highlighted.