The European Library (Tel) – The Gate To Europe's Knowledge: Milestone Conference

Citation

Woldering, B. (2002), "The European Library (Tel) – The Gate To Europe's Knowledge: Milestone Conference", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919hac.001

The European Library (Tel) – The Gate To Europe's Knowledge: Milestone Conference

Britta Woldering

On April 29-30, 2002 "The European Library (Tel) – The Gate to Europe's Knowledge: Milestone Conference" was held at Die Deutsche Bibliothek (The German National Library) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The meeting was attended by 115 people from 23 countries.

In addition to print media, which are likely to retain their importance in many areas, networked publications, interactive and multimedia products and services will play an increasingly important role over the next few years. In order to structure the vast flood of information for the benefit of the individual scholar and decision-maker, and ultimately for every private citizen, WWW gateways and portals will need to be created and continuously upgraded. This task requires international co-operation on both technology and content.

Nine European national libraries together with the Conference of European National Librarians are constructing the basis for such a portal concept in the project "The European Library" (TEL). TEL is an accompanying measure within the framework of the Key Action 3 of the IST-Programme (Information Society Technologies) of the European Union (EU).

On the basis of the decentralized digital and conventional holdings of the participating national libraries the technical, legal and context platform of a pan-European information server is to be created. In future users will be able to search all online catalogues of the European national libraries simultaneously with a single inquiry, proceeding from there to access their digital and conventional holdings and services. Definition and clarification of legal issues concerning copyright and licensing as well as a business model play an important role.

The results of the first half of the project were presented at the international TEL Milestone Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. External speakers supplemented and commented on the TEL presentations in four sessions. An additional fifth session on European Information Networks rounded the conference off.

For more information about the TEL project please have a look at the TEL Web site: www.europeanlibrary.org

In Session 5: European Information Networks, three European projects were presented the results of which will be of great importance for TEL.

Geneviève Clavel-Merrin (Swiss National Library) presented the Multilingual Access to Subjects (MACS) project carried out by the Swiss National Library, Die Deutsche Bibliothek, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and The British Library. MACS aims to provide multilingual subject access to library catalogues. It enables users to simultaneously search the catalogues of the project's partner libraries in the language of their choice (English, French or German).

This multilingual search is made possible thanks to the equivalence links created between the three indexing languages used in these libraries: SWD (for German), RAMEAU (for French) and LCSH (for English). Topics (headings) from the three lists are analysed to determine whether they are exact or partial matches, of a simple or complex nature. The end result is neither a translation nor a new thesaurus but a mapping of existing and widely used indexing languages.

There are about 70,000 links between Rameau and LCSH which were created by the Canadian National Library several years ago. The next step in the MACS project will be to link the SWD equivalences to them.

On the basis of this approach, a prototype has been developed by Index Data (Denmark) and Tilburg University Library (The Netherlands). The prototype contains a small subset of data from the indexing languages and the libraries' databases in the field of sports and theatre so that link creation and management and subsequent searching can be explored and tested.

URL to the prototype: http://infolab.kub.nl/prj/macs/

The next presentation was given by Hans Jürgen Becker (Lower Saxony State and University Library Göttingen) on the EU project Renardus. The Renardus service aims to provide a trusted source of selected, high quality Internet resources for those teaching, learning and researching in higher education in Europe. Renardus provides integrated search and browse access to records from individual participating subject gateway services across Europe.

The Renardus service grew from a project funded from 1 January 2000 until 30 June 2002 by the EU's Information Society Technologies 5th framework programme. The service is hosted at Niedersächsische Staats – und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen, Germany (SUB) on behalf of the Renardus Consortium Management Group.

Renardus exploits the success of subject gateways, where subject experts select quality resources for their users, usually within the academic and research communities. This approach has been shown to provide a high quality and valued service, but encounters problems with the ever increasing number of resources available on the Internet. Renardus is based on a distributed model where major subject gateway services across Europe can be searched and browsed together through a single interface provided by the Renardus broker. The Renardus pilot system can be tested under: http://www.renardus.org

The last presentation in this session was on project LEAF (Linking and Exploring Authority Files) by Jutta Weber (Berlin State Library), the project co-ordinator. LEAF is a three year project, which began in March 2001 and is co-funded by the European Commission Information Society Technologies Programme. It is developing a model architecture for a distributed search system harvesting existing name authority information aiming at automatically establishing a user needs based common name authority file in a specific sector highly relevant to the cultural heritage of Europe.

The project results will be implemented by extending an existing, fully functional, international online Search and Retrieval service network of OPAC's that provides information about modern manuscripts and letters, the MALVINE project, and to extend this into a global multilingual and multimedia information service about people and corporate bodies based on user needs.

The model architecture is intended to be applicable to other kinds of cultural/scientific objects and data, ensuring through the use of authority file information that the representation of the objects in question is of high quality. The LEAF demonstrator will thus provide a valuable example of how dynamic user interaction with the cultural/scientific content can considerably enhance the user experience. More information can be found at the LEAF homepage: www.leaf-eu.org.

Britta Woldering(woldering@dbf.ddb.de) is with the Deutsche Bibliothek (German National Library), Frankfurt am Main, Germany.