PROJECTS
Digital Heritage & Cultural Content

TEL
The European Library

Summary

Currently there is a trend for national libraries to move towards a more encompassing role in which they can co-operate to provide a wider educational, cultural, scientific and economic entity serving the requirements of a pan-European community of users. In realising this aim the libraries will have to develop imaginative and novel ways of integrating various technical components and devise ways of implementing standardised network technology to work in an optimal manner with the catalogues, digital libraries and other services. Access to cultural and scientific knowledge, such as major national and deposit collections, is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve as more and more source material is being available in electronic format. Therefore, there is a need to investigate how to make a mixture of traditional and electronic formats available in a coherent manner to both local and remote users.

Improving cultural and scientific knowledge infrastructure in Europe

TEL is an accompanying measure under the cultural heritage applications area of Key Action 3 of the Information Societies Technology (IST) research programme. It aims to set up a co-operative framework in support of ongoing work in the IST programme and at national level in European countries leading to distributed access to major national digital collections. The project will build upon the ongoing digital library developments in individual participating libraries, and will help to lay down the policy and develop the technical groundwork for a sustainable pan-European digital library based on distributed digital collections and on the operational digital library developments in the participating libraries and agencies.

TEL will contribute to the cultural and scientific knowledge infrastructure within Europe by developing co-operative and concerted approaches to technical and business issues associated with distributed access to large-scale content. Thus, the objective of the project is to set up a co-operative framework which will lead to a system for access to the major national and deposit collections (mainly digital, but not precluding paper) in European national libraries.

Stakeholder involvement and project results

The project will set up a consortium of national libraries and the nature of the work is heavily based on consensus building through human networking with a large number of stakeholders on standards and processes, in addition to testing critical areas such as interoperability, scalability and multilingual features. The main results of the project are expected to be the developing and testing of open standards, working methods and practices that can readily be adopted by all national libraries to work as a seamless partnership. These will be achieved through the following four specific objectives:

1. Publisher relations
   The consortium will work with significant publishers of electronic materials and publisher organisations to establish co-operative approaches to business, licensing and copyright material.
2. Business plans and models
   The consortium will investigate appropriate business plans and models, which will maximise the benefits of co-operation, and will consult with other projects and agencies to develop a concerted best practice.
3. Metadata development
   The consortium will consult with other projects and agencies to develop a concerted best practice approach to metadata standards and schemas that will support wide-scale access to digital material, offline digital materials and non-digital materials through national libraries.
4. Interoperability test-beds
   The project will include two test-beds to develop the functional specification for an operational service and define benchmark for the test work.

Potential project beneficiaries

During the project efforts will concentrate on the services and collections of the project partners, but the intention is that the findings of the project will soon afterwards lead to an operational service. Those who are likely to benefit from the project phase of TEL include the European national libraries which are not yet involved in the project, information professionals who are engaged in related projects, other specialists, publishers, publishers’ organisations and policy-makers concerned with technical, legal and content issues of digital publications.

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Results

Current project information and results are continuously made available on the project website. The project results include:

• TEL Metadata state of the art review.
• TEL Digital deposits state of the art review. This report provides an overview of current practices regarding digital deposits at national libraries throughout Europe.
• 1st European Library Seminar held in Ljubljana 10-12 June 2001; including a presentation held during the seminar and workshop reports.

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Project Facts and Consortium Information

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