TEL Project Factsheet

This webpage has been archived. Its content will not be updated.

The European Library, TEL, is a pioneering collaboration between a number of European national libraries. Created under the auspices of CENL, the Conference of European national librarians, it will establish a professionally designed and maintained single access point to selected parts of their holdings spanning a range of collections in all the partner national libraries so that the informed citizen in any country can utilise the resources not only of his or her own national library but also, during the same search session, the resources of any other partner national libraries which may hold material relevant to his or her interest. This discovery and access tool will be multilingual and it will support the various character sets in use in CENL libraries.

Initially, the feasibility of this venture is being tested, with part-funding from the European Commission, in a project in which the participants are CENL, the national libraries of Finland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with ICCU, the national central cataloguing institute from Italy. In time it is anticipated that more and more of the CENL member libraries will join the enterprise as full partners. In order to achieve this goal the participants are working towards the establishment of mechanisms whereby a common portal will enable access to the collections of the united national libraries to any citizen via the Internet.

The vision of TEL stems from the unique characteristics that the national libraries offer. These include:

• the comprehensiveness of the collections held by each of the national libraries, a feature that is greatly enhanced when the national libraries unite and pool their resources;



• the national libraries' holdings of outstanding historical and special collections, offering a richness and diversity that cannot be found anywhere else;



• that one of the most important reasons for an Internet user to use the services of the national libraries is the reliability of information and the high quality;



• the fact that national libraries are the institutions that are the most dedicated in their own countries to the long term preservation of the intellectual output, both traditional and digital, of their own country; when the various national libraries unite in their service offerings, the worth of this feature is greatly enhanced;



• that as many of the resources in the national libraries are unique, the libraries should invest in creating added value to the digitised documents: the national libraries are in many cases the only source of information for a user;



• that in a united Europe the national libraries are in a unique position to show the cultural diversity within each country and in all the participating countries acting in unison;



• that the national libraries are aware of the European identity of their collections alongside their national identity.

In short, TEL offers the opportunity to unite the resources of Europe's national libraries, to the benefit of the libraries themselves and to the benefit of Europe's citizenry, businesses and institutions.

Funding - 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 Society Technologies (IST) research programme.

Duration -The project officially commenced on February 1st, 2001, and will run for 30 months until July 2003.

Who might benefit? - The parties who might benefit from the TEL project are information professionals whose interests are related to the collections covered in the TEL service, researchers who are unable to personally visit their national library (or national libraries in other countries who may also hold material of interest to them), publishers, businesses, lifelong learners, anyone interested in the contents of digital publications, and also those European national libraries which are not yet involved in the project but who wish to reach a broader, international, user community.

Results - 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

• Common approach on negotiating legal and voluntary deposit agreements with publishers.
• Establishing co-operative approaches to business, licensing and copyright matters.

Business plans and models

• Development of business plans and models.
• Market research.
• User surveys.

Metadata development

• Development of common standards for metadata to support wide scale access to digital, off-line digital and non-digital materials.
• Concertation work on multilingual access to support a model for a multilingual service.

Interoperability testbeds

Search in distributed databases using Z39.50 and http/XML, including

• testing of interoperability (between Z39.50 targets and http/XML server),
  
• access to publications,
• multilingual features,
• evaluation of performance.

Project partners - 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 Univerzitetna Knjiznica v Ljubljani (Slovenia) and the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL).

Project information - Current project information is continuously made available on the website www.europeanlibrary.org. This information includes results and project information that has been published already, a calendar of events as well as a site search. Apart from this an electronic TEL newsletter is issued and mailed to numerous e-mail lists.

Plans for the future - 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. The partners committed themselves to carry out the necessary work towards this goal. The other member national libraries of CENL have been 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.

Contact

Howard Shoemark
The British Library
Boston Spa
Wetherby
West Yorkshire LS23 7BQ
United Kingdom
Phone +44 1937 54 65 96
Fax +44 1937 54 65 86
E-mail: howard.shoemark@bl.uk

Further information - www.europeanlibrary.org

Document with logo in:

Word (425 KB)        RTF (17.909 KB)