The TEL Vision

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(version 11/11/02)

TEL offers the opportunity to unite the resources of Europe"s national libraries by providing a discovery and access tool to the benefit of Europe"s informed citizens, of researchers and academics in a variety of institutions, and of the libraries themselves.

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 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 Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico (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 integrate their resources; since 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;
• 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 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; and that the national libraries are aware of the European identity of their collections alongside their national identity.