Background
TELplus was a project funded by the European Commission under the
eContentplus Programme,
within the domain of ‘Digital Libraries’.
The project was supported by CENL,
the Conference of European National Librarians,
and was coordinated by the National Library of Estonia.
The overall goal of TELplus was to strengthen, expand and improve
The European Library.
Managed by CENL,The European Library is an on-line
portal providing access to the electronic resources of the National Libraries of Europe.
During the past years, The European Library has gradually expanded to include
48 National Libraries from all EU and EFTA countries. This
has been achieved thanks
to a number of projects, amongst which the EU-funded projects
TEL-ME-MOR
and
EDLproject, which, altogether, have contributed
to the inclusion in the service of the collections of 19 National Libraries.
The European Library has been officially acknowledged by the
European Commission as the organisational
structure for the creation of
Europeana, the European digital library, museum and archive.
Funded under the
eContentplus Programme,
Europeana has developed
a prototype portal offering access to some 4 million digital objects,
including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps,
manuscripts, books,
newspapers and archival papers. A series of recent and upcoming projects will be channelling
resources into Europeana and will bring the Europeana prototype to full service.
Information on these projects are available here.
Objectives
The main objectives of TELplus were:
a) To enhance the service offered by
The European Library by improving and facilitating
access and use of the materials in national libraries
in all Member States in a multilingual context and improving
standard-based interoperability.
b) To strengthen, extend and improve The European
Library service by adding digital cultural and
scientific/scholarly content and improving access to it in the following ways:
Adding and improving content of The European Library by:
- OCRing more than 20 million pages of important multi-lingual content now available only as images according to current best practice;
- Making the data that national libraries currently hold in proprietary databases (only searchable via the z39:50 protocol) OAI compliant and therefore harvestable for far greater usability;
- Adding the National Libraries of Bulgaria and Romania as full members of The European Library.
Improving access and usability by:
- Improving full text indexing and investigating automatic vocabulary mappings;
- Learning from users through The European Library user group;
- Creating a modular service infrastructure that enables users to integrate services with the European Library portal and adding a number of new services;
- Work on user personalization to provide directions towards new services for users;
- Providing translations of collection descriptions in 26 languages.
Target users
TELplus was a technical project and an additional block towards the creation of Europeana through the strengthening, extension and improvement of The European Library service.
As a result, the project activities targeted a range different stakeholders, from the cultural, educational, industrial and public sectors, namely:
- Libraries, museums, archives
- Educational institutions (schools, universities, etc.)
- Government agencies and policy makers (Ministries of Culture, Education etc.)
- Local authorities
- Researchers
- Business
- General public
Project budget & timeframe
- TELplus had a total budget of € 6,501,714.00, of which € 3,250,857.00 was
contributed by the eContentplus Programme. The project started in October 2007 and it was completed in December 2009.
Programme of work and results
Access the TELplus workplan here and read about results from the outcomes page.
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