The Archive of European Integration (AEI) is "an electronic repository and archive for research materials on the topic of European integration and unification"[1]. In August 2011, the AEI contained over 15,000 freely available documents – both scholarly research papers on these topics as well as official European Community/European Union documents, making it one of the largest online repositories of EU documents worldwide.
The AEI is hosted and maintained by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing program. The AEI is a collaborative effort of the University Library System (ULS), the European Union Center (EUC), the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) (all three located at the University of Pittsburgh) as well as the European Research Papers Archive (ERPA) (located in Vienna, Austria).
The AEI system is powered by EPrints 3, free Open Source software developed by the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK.
The ULS also hosts an extended search engine named AEIplus, which includes the documents from AEI and ERPA.
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The Archive of European Integration (AEI) was initiated by Dr. Phil Wilkin, Social Sciences Bibliographer and current Editor of the AEI, at the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, in collaboration with Dr. Michael Nentwich, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Technology Assessment, Vienna, Austria. Mr. Nentwich is a managing editor of the European Research Papers Archive.[2]
Since the creation of the AEI in February 2003, the University Library System (ULS) has provided the technical and material support for the AEI.[3] The task of designing and implementing the archive was undertaken by a team from the ULS Department of Information Systems including Timothy Deliyannides, Brian Gregg, Jeffrey Wisniewski and Demetrios Ioannides. The AEI is also supported by the European Union Center of Excellence and European Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh, and the European Union Studies Association (EUSA), housed at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Alberta Sbragia, former Director, European Union Center of Excellence and Center for European Studies, University of Pittsburgh, and current Vice Provost for Graduate Studies, University of Pittsburgh, serves as a consultant for AEI. Phil Wilkin administers all academic and intellectual aspects of the AEI.
Since fall 2004, Barbara Sloan, formerly Head of Public Inquiries, Delegation of the European Commission to the US, Washington, DC, has been active in all phases of the development of the AEI-EU section of the AEI. In 2007, the European Union donated to the University of Pittsburgh the extensive depository collection of the Delegation of the European Commission to the USA in Washington, D.C., making Pitt's collection of EU documents the largest in North America.[4][5][6] AEI staff selected thousands of documents from this collection for digitization, and they continue to digitize and add the most frequently requested documents to the AEI on an ongoing basis.[2]