The European Library (TEL) - The Gate to Europe's knowledge

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The European Library (TEL) is a co-operative project of eight European national libraries along with ICCU, the Italian central cataloguing institution, established under the aegis of the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL).

At its recent meeting in Vilnius on 29th September 2003, the CENL representing 42 national libraries in Europe adopted a resolution supporting plans for the creation of a new pan-European library service. To be called "The European Library", this service will provide resource discovery facilities aimed at researchers and informed citizens. It will offer integrated access to the collections of the national libraries of Europe alongside information about the libraries themselves.

The creation of this service represents the successful culmination of 36 months of work by the partners in the TEL project, an accompanying measure funded under the European Union's IST programme. The development of the service will be based upon the outcomes of the project and will be launched towards the end of 2004. The development and support of "The European Library" will be carried out by a specially created and staffed "European Library Ofice" which will be hosted by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands and funded by contributions from the national libraries.

The main achievements of the TEL project have been:

• the creation of a consensus between national libraries on the mission and content of The European Library and agreement on a business model for the development and support of The European Library Service
• the establishment of agreed metadata profiles (based on common standards) for objects and collections within an environment which will enable their controlled evolution to accommodate new types of material and new collections as The European Library grows
• the design of a flexible system architecture based on the SRU protocol