TALARIA is an open-source resource-sharing management software, which has been developed under the framework of the European project HERMES Strengthening Digital Resource Sharing during COVID and
beyond.
HERMES was conceived to reinforce the RSCVD (Resource Sharing during COVID-19) initiative of the IFLA Document Delivery & Resource Sharing Section. RSCVD was based on the voluntary contribution of a hundred librarians around the world, who worked with the tools available at that moment in order to share documents held in their libraries with the world academic community.
RSCVD was the first experiment in free digital resource sharing worldwide. In November 2023, the meaning of the RSCVD acronym was rethought and renamed to “Resource Sharing Collaborative and Voluntary Document Delivery”.
During the design and development process of TALARIA, the exchange with RSCVD volunteers and librarians has been very important: they have been involved in testing the software to collect feedback, make improvements, detect and correct bugs to build reliable, user-oriented software. Additionally, along with the release of the new software, distance training activities have been organised, and software guidelines and users’ tasks have been published to support librarians in their daily resource sharing workflow.
This manual is expressly dedicated to the librarians whose libraries adopt the TALARIA software. It is available in different languages and provides a detailed guideline on implementing and using the open-source software, drawn from the experience of the RSCVD community, the first adopters of TALARIA.