The European Library (TEL) Newsletter
May 2004
The European Library Team appointed
"The European Library (TEL)" project was finished successfully on January 31, 2004. The key aim of TEL was to investigate the feasibility of establishing a new Pan-European service which would ultimately give access to the combined resources of the national libraries of Europe. The project was partly funded by the European Commission as an accompanying measure under the cultural heritage applications area of Key Action 3 of the Information Societies Technology (IST) research programme. The project ran for 36 months with the following partners: the Conference of European National Librarians (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.
The results of the project build the basis for The European Library Service which will be established under the aegis of the CENL by The European Library Office, hosted by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague. The day-to-day work will be done by a small team which is responsible for the management, the marketing, the implementation and maintenance of the website and the portal as well as for the technical support of the participants.
The team members are appointed now and will start to transfer the project results into an operational service, including the parts of the current European national libraries' webservice Gabriel which are of public interest.
The team members are:
Jill Cousins from the UK is Head of the European Library Office and the contact person for The European Library: jill.cousins@kb.nlOlaf Janssen from the Netherlands is Web Assistant for The European Library and the contact for the partners for content, presentation, use and multi-lingual issues.
Julie Verleyen from France is Technical Assistant for The European Library and the contact for the partners for technical infrastructure, harvesting, the metadata registry, implementation of Z39.50/SRU, indexing and data storage.
The European Library project website (www.europeanlibrary.org) as well as Gabriel will remain online until the launch of The European Library. For further information please contact the Head of the European Library Office.
On behalf of the TEL project partners,
Britta Woldering
Gabriel Team member Die Deutsche Bibliothek