Dr Wim van Drimmelen - Chair of CENL Director-General, National Library of the Netherlands
The Conference of European National Librarians (Chair: Wim van Drimmelen, The Netherlands) is a foundation under Dutch law. Members of CENL are the national librarians of all member states of the Council of Europe. The conference currently consists of 41 members from 39 European countries. CENL has a standing committee for projects: CoBRA Forum (Chair: Lynne Brindley, United Kingdom). CENL pursues its objectives by means of annual membership meetings, initiating and monitoring co-operative international projects, participating in international discussions on standards, and supporting research and development activities. The last meeting took place in Riga, Latvia, 27-28 September 2001.
Website Gabriel
Gabriel is the CENL network service on the world wide web (www.kb.nl/gabriel). The Gabriel Board (Chair: Elisabeth Niggemann, Germany) decides on the main policy lines. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, national library of the Netherlands, takes care of the maintenance and editing of the service. A new interface (front-end) has been developed as well as a Database Input Tool (DIT), which the Gabriel contacts can use to update information on their library and its services.
The European Library
The European Commission supports the project, which started in February 2001, as an accompanying measure (€ 1.2 million), i.e. the aim of the project is consensus building and not the implementation of an operational service (http://www.europeanlibrary.org/).
The first results were presented at a Milestone Conference in Frankfurt, April 29-30, 2002. Gabriel is envisioned to function as a portal to The European Library. In the project phase a link will be established between Gabriel and the TEL testbed.
Joint CENL/FEP Committee
The joint committee of CENL and FEP (Federation of European Publishers) functions as an advisory body for Work Package 1 of the TEL project (on publisher relations). In 2002 the committee started a discussion with the aim of updating the statement on the development and establishment of codes of practice for the voluntary deposit of electronic publications.
Survey on Projects
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France presented the results of a survey of national and international projects in which European national libraries are involved. The results are being used to update the information about projects on Gabriel (http://www.kb.nl/gabriel/en/projects.html). The BnF took the initiative to carry out a new survey in 2002.
Multilingual Access to Subject Catalogues
In the MACS project, co-ordinated by the Swiss National Library, a prototype system has been developed, which enables multilingual subject access to bibliographic records in library catalogues by linking existing subject heading languages. The prototype is built on three languages (English, German, and French). Two hundred users have registered to test the prototype and a summary report of the test phase would be placed on the MACS homepage.
A second project has started to create multilingual access to Eastern European libraries catalogues (co-ordinator: national library of Slovenia). It was decided to investigate MACS as a potential solution.
Performance Evaluation
A questionnaire designed to establish current practice relating to performance indicators had been sent to CENL member libraries towards the end of 2001 (co-ordinator: national library of Slovenia). Next, core services in national libraries will be defined and performance indicators will be developed.
Networking Standards
The working group on networking standards had been chaired by Esko Häkli (Finland). His successor, Kai Ekholm, accepted to become the new chair of the working group. The group has put forward three amendments to the Bath Profile at the October ZIG meeting: mandatory support for MARC21; new functionality to enable copy cataloguing of authority records; usage of multiple attribute sets in a single query. The working group is monitoring developments in the field, such as Z39.50 International: Next Generation (ZING), registration of national bibliography numbers (NBN) and ISBNs for use within URNs, the relationship between OpenURLs, Z39.50 and URNs.
Renardus
The Renardus project aims to improve access to a range of current Internet-based information services across Europe. The approach being taken is to develop a 'broker' service - a single interface for searching and browsing across existing distributed resource collections produced at a national level. The project ends in June 2002. A workshop has been held in November 2001 in Copenhagen for potential participant gateways and other relevant organisations.
The role of national libraries in leading the development of subject gateways within their respective countries has been discussed. The situation varies between countries, in some cases the developments are led by the higher education sector. It is not necessarily the role of the national libraries to lead these kinds of developments but they should contribute to them when appropriate.
Report by Gerard van Trier, Corporate Secretary, National Library of the Netherlands and - Secretary of CENL