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.