The European
Library (TEL) project is being coordinated by The British Library, with funding
of 1.2 million euros from the European Commission's Information Societies
Technology (IST) research programme. Detailed information
on how the project is progressing can be found on the TEL website
.
Uniting the eight
national libraries of Finland, Germany, Italy, the
Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland, and the UK with
the Instituto Centrale per
il Catalogo Unico in Italy and the Conference
of European National Librarians
(CENL), the project
will make recommendations on how to improve 'interoperability'
across national boundaries. Alongside the EC-funded
activities, the national libraries have made a commitment to
fund additional work to develop an operational service soon
after the project phase is completed.
 Differing standards so data cannot
be easily shared
TEL members
currently use a range of different standards - for
cataloguing, indexing, and preserving materials - which means
that data cannot be easily shared. For example around half
currently use the Z39.50 indexing standard and half use XML,
creating problems in the creation of common catalogues and
databases. TEL members aim to prepare the way to solve
interoperability problems, such as these, by agreeing and
testing a range of standards, working methods and practices,
which will enable all the national libraries to work as a
seamless
partnership.
By the end of
the project members aim to have reached a consensus on which
types of digital material to collect and to have agreed a
common approach on negotiating legal and voluntary deposit
agreements with publishers (both the major publishing houses
and the producers of informal e-journals and other materials).
Other objectives include reaching agreement on how to preserve
materials for future access (given that digital publishing
formats rapidly become obsolete); developing common and
complementary business plans and agreeing common standards to
allow readers to access catalogue records and publications
from TEL members. Whilst the bulk of the work focuses on
consensus building, the project also involves preparatory
technical work to develop 'testbeds', which will gauge whether
interoperability is achievable.
Create flexible solutions to expand to
other libraries
In common with
the British Library, many European libraries already have
Digital Library Programmes and TEL will seek to build on these
existing projects and to take account of new developments
outside the group. Whilst focusing on member organisations'
collections and services, TEL aims to create flexible
solutions that will allow the project to expand to include
other libraries. More than 40 other national libraries in 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.
Lynne Brindley,
Chief Executive of the British Library, said: 'We are
extremely pleased to be leading this important project to
improve access to the digital resources of major European
national libraries. The vision of a seamless European library
comes one step closer to reality through this project, to the
benefit of students, scholars and citizens across
Europe.
Elisabeth
Niggemann, Director of Die Deutsche Bibliothek, commented:
'The European Library project takes up the challenge of
today's information society. As global networks grow in
importance the significance of shared standards is greater
than ever. TEL is visionary and ambitious and will continue
the good tradition of project co-operation between the
European national libraries.'
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Patricia Manson of the IST research
programme, added: 'TEL brings together a significant
partnership of national libraries across Europe, building on a
strong history of successful cooperation. The development of
common infrastructures and services, through agreements on
standards and shared approaches, is an important step in
making national collections accessible to citizens across
Europe.'
The TEL project
focuses on four key areas:
Publisher
relations:
The
consortium will work with significant publishers
of electronic materials and publisher
organisations to establish cooperative approaches
to business, licensing and copyright matters.
Specific goals include
improving current national-based practices and
developing an agreed set of common approaches at
European level, through the development of good
practice guidelines and streamlined negotiating
procedures.
Business
plans and models:
The consortium will
develop business plans and models that will
maximise the benefits of cooperation - 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 suitable for implementation by
member organisations in future operational
services.
Metadata
development:
The consortium will
develop, in cooperation with relevant projects and
agencies, a concerted best practice approach to
metadata standards and schemas. This will aid
wide-scale access to digital material, off-line
digital materials and non-digital materials
through the national libraries. This work-package
aims to produce an agreed protocol between the
members for metadata construction and reduce the
number of schemas in use overall. Schemas for
agreed approaches will be tested in the testbed
work-package. The project will also 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 encourage
the wide adoption of interoperability standards in
Europe. The aspects that will be taken into
account are: access, content, interoperability and
performance. This work will develop a 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
focusing on Z39.50 and XML. Testing will include
scalability of access and multi-lingual
capability.
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