The European Library: opportunities for new services

Van Veen, Theo The European Library: opportunities for new services., 2002 . In 2nd. Open Archives Forum Workshop, Lisbon, December 2002. [Presentation]

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English abstract

The European Library Project (TEL), sponsored by the European Commission, brings together 10 major European national libraries and library organisations to investigate the technical and policy issues involved in sharing digital resources. The objective of TEL is to set up a co-operative framework, which will lead to a system for access to the major national and deposit collections in European national libraries. In this presentation I will discuss the development of a metadata model and the development of an interoperability testbed. This testbed will offer distributed searching in the national collections via Z39.50 alongside searching a central index of metadata harvested from other collections via the Open Archives Initiative protocol (OAI-PMH). Access to this central index is offered via SRU - a new protocol for search and retrieval based on http and XML initiated by the Z39.50 Implementers Group as a low barrier alternative to Z39.50. The major challenges in the technical work of this project are related to the diversity of collections, languages and local services. From a user perspective TEL hopes to meet these challenges by lowering the barrier for users to access the different collections by offering metadata searches integrated in a central index, not just a menu of web sites and we hope to offer translations of search terms and facilitate searching on names by providing access to different name authority databases. From a provider perspective we hope to lower the barrier to participate in TEL by using simple protocols and by facilitating conversions. And from a library perspective we hope to share machine-readable metadata by developing a common metadata model and vocabularies with tools that allow for an ongoing evolution. TEL will offer access to different services like multilingual services, name authority services and links to local services. One of the keys to meet the above challenges is integration: metadata generated by each service should be usable when accessing other services. This requires a common understanding of metadata, an easy way to carry metadata from one service to other services and an easy way to associate related metadata. It will be discussed how the TEL metadata development, resulting in a TEL Application Profile, dynamically generated links and integrated indexing of different types of metadata will contribute to fulfil those requirements. With name authorities as an example it will be demonstrated how this contributes to bringing new services within a “one mouse click distance”. Integrated object metadata and name authority search will help the user in finding main entries rather than telling the user that his search resulted in no hits. A pan-European "Central Name Authority File", as being one of the results of the LEAF project can contribute in the realisation of these valuable services.

Item type: Presentation
Keywords: Open Archives Initiative (OAI),European Library Project (TEL), LEAF
Subjects: L. Information technology and library technology
Depositing user: Andrea Marchitelli
Date deposited: 11 Apr 2005
Last modified: 02 Oct 2014 11:58
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/4697

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