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European Library

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The European Library
Type of site
Portal to library-content
Ownerconsortium of 23 national libraries
URLhttp://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/
CommercialNo

The European Library is a service on the World Wide Web that offers access to the resources of the 47 national libraries of Europe. The resources, both digital and non-digital, include books, magazines, journals, audio recordings and other material. The European Library portal offers free searching, and delivers metadata records as well as digital objects: some free, others at cost. The global management of The European Library is based on a consortium of 23 subscribing national libraries, all in charge of maintaining and developing the portal services.

History

The European Library portal was created in cooperation with 9 national libraries and CENL (Conference of European National Librarians) under TEL (The European Library: Gateway to Europe's Knowledge) project. Initiated in 2001, the TEL project ended in 2004 and was funded under the Fifth Framework Programme of the European Commission. The national libraries involved in the project were those of Finland, Germany, Italy (Florence), Italy (Rome) Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland and United Kingdom.

TheEuropeanLibrary.org portal was launched on March 17, 2005, hosting over 500,000 visitors in a little more than a year. There are currently 23 national libraries’ searchable collections available from the portal and further 21 national libraries’ collections accessible through the portal hyperlinks. National libraries of Austria, Croatia and Serbia joined in July 2005.

The national libraries of the 10 European Union new Member States joined as full participants of The European Library service under TELMEMOR (The European Library: Modular Extensions for Mediating Online Resources) (2005 -2007). On January 1 2006 the national libraries of Estonia and Latvia as well as the Danish Royal Library became full members of the consortium. In July of 2006 the national libraries of the Czech & Slovak Republics and Hungary were able to display all their digital resources in the portal and Cyprus, Lithuania, Malta, Poland had all their digital content live in The European Library by the end of December 2006.

The European Library has taken a further step towards its enlargement with EDLproject. This adds the digital objects and items of the remaining 9 EU & EFTA national libraries within the EDL project launched in September 2006. The countries involved are either members of the European Union or the European Free Trade Association: Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain and Sweden. Next to assisting participants in becoming full partners of The European Library, the project focuses on multi-linguality, undertakes the first steps towards a European Metadata Registry and is creating a roadmap for potential digitization efforts in the national libraries. EDLproject has also been responsible for 2 successful workshops looking at the technical and political issues of bringing other cultural heritage digital repositories together as a European digital library. EDL project is financially supported by the European Commission under the eContentplus Programme and will run for 18 months.

Plans

In the near future, The European Library aims to become the central gateway to all electronic resources for 47 European national libraries. On March 2 2006 the European Commission issued a press release[1] stating that The European Library shall provide infrastructure for the European Digital Library, a common service to access the collections of all major digital heritage holders (libraries, archives and museums) in Europe.

Search tool

TheEuropeanLibrary.org portal is constantly adjusting to the new end-users needs and mirrors the growth in member national libraries. At first, the portal was in an experimental stage and only accessible through Internet Explorer 6.0 web browser. Since June 2005 visitors using Internet Explorer (PC users) but also Camino (MAC users), Netscape, Mozilla or Firefox can benefit from The European Library services. Other browsers like Opera, Safari and Galeon are not yet compatible with the architecture of The European Library portal (client-side XML parsing). TheEuropeanLibrary.org portal is maintained by The European Library Office located in the premises of the Dutch Royal Library in The Hague and is managed by Jill Cousins, Director of The European Library. Since March 2007 The European Library searchbox ('mini library') can be transported to other websites.

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