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The European Library Project

Publisher relations
Business plans and models
Metadata development
Interoperability testbeds

A consortium of national libraries has been set up to pursue an exciting new initiative aimed at improving co-operative working by Europe's national libraries in handling digital and other collections in the future. The initiative is called "The European Library" (TEL).

The objective of TEL 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. TEL will investigate how to make a mixture of traditional and electronic formats available in a coherent manner to both local and remote users. TEL is largely being funded by the European Commission as an accompanying measure under the cultural heritage applications area of Key Action 3 of the Information Societies Technology (IST) research programme. 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. It will lay the policy and technical groundwork towards a sustainable pan European digital library based on distributed digital collections, building on the operational digital library developments in the participating libraries and agencies. The main results 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:

Publisher relations

The specific goal is to improve current national-based practices and to develop an agreed set of common approaches at European level, through the development of good practice guidelines and streamlined negotiating procedures. The consortium will work with significant publishers of electronic materials and publisher organisations to establish co-operative approaches to business, licensing and copyright matters.

Business plans and models

The consortium will develop business plans and models which will maximise the benefits of co-operation. This will be partly dependent on the work done on publisher relations. Work will include market research and user surveys. This work package will also clarify the partners' goals in exploitation of the service, which in turn affects the harmonisation of authentication and payment solutions. The result of this work will be joint or individual business plans and models reflecting the various possible scenarios which will be suitable for implementation by participating organisations in future operational services.

Metadata development

The consortium will develop, in co-operation with relevant projects and agencies, a concerted best practice approach to metadata standards and schemas that will support wide scale access to digital material, off-line digital materials and non-digital materials through national libraries. The work will include publisher metadata. The project will also explore issues related to scaling of distributed access and aggregated indexing. The result of this objective will be an agreed protocol between the members for metadata construction, reduction in the number of schemas in use overall, and schemas for agreed approaches to be tested in the testbed work package. The project will also carry out concertation work on multi-lingual access and will investigate a model for a multilingual service, by setting up procedures for synchronising various versions of the service in different languages. Initially the languages of the partners will be implemented, but the model will be open to other languages.

Interoperability testbeds

The testbeds will be the environment to jointly experiment and, as a result, provide optimal solutions for the development of services. The technical outcomes of the testing will also support the concertation aspects of the project in encouraging the wide adoption in Europe of interoperability standards. The aspects that will be taken into account are: access, content, interoperability and performance. This work will develop the functional specification for an operational service and define benchmarks for the test work, but will not aim to develop a mini-version of an eventual operational system. Two testbeds will be developed focused on Z39.50 and XML Testing will include scalability of access and multi-lingual capability arising from results identified through concertation on multi-lingual access.

The partners in the consortium are The British Library (Co-ordinating Partner), Die Deutsche Bibliothek (Germany), Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Netherlands), Helsinki University Library (Finland), the Swiss National Library, Biblioteca Nacional (Portugal), Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale Firenze (Italy), Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico (Italy), Narodna in Universzitetna Knjiznica v Ljubljani (Slovenia) and the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL).

The project officially commenced on 1 February 2001 and will run for thirty months. 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 lead soon afterwards to an operational service and the partners have made the commitment to carry out the necessary work towards this goal. The other member national libraries of CENL will be invited to monitor the progress of the project with a view to taking the necessary steps to become fully involved in the eventual operational service.

Further information and updates on progress can be found on the TEL Website.