Getting Europe’s libraries online

Europe’s national libraries are collaborating on the production of two cd-roms containing bibliographic records but that is just a start.

“The CEC sees libraries as crucial in the creation and flow of information in this information-rich age,” explains the British Library’s Robert Smith, who, as Project Manager, has been overseeing the National Libraries Project for DG of the CEC. “The Commission wants to raise the profile of libraries within the Community and beyond. It wants them to take advantage of new technologies as they become available. And it wants them to become more businesslike.”
    The national libraries of its member countries represent vital resources to the CEC in its commitment to maintaining the pluralistic nature of European culture. In 1985, the Ministers of Culture declared that the efficient functioning of libraries was both an economic imperative as well as a cultural one. They felt that existing resources needed to be used as efficiently as possible, that new forms of collaboration needed to be considered, and a pan-European infrastructure needed to be developed to support Europe’s libraries. This decree resulted in the Action Plan for Libraries, which was initiated in 1991. Its pilot program is the National Libraries Project on cd-rom; this July sees its first results.

Sub-projects
The basic goal of the Project is to make it easier for users to access European national bibliographies by improving the interchange of bibliographic records. Specifically, this means developing joint strategies, applications, and formats for distributing bibliographic data on cd-rom. To achieve this, the Project has been split into separate sub-projects, or “workpackages.” These include: 1) definition of a retrieval interface for CD-ROM (Copenhagen), 2) tools for marc conversion (The Hague), 3) definition of a basic European character set (Florence), 4) a multilingual interface (Paris), 5) online CD-ROM links, 6) links for local libraries, 7) CD-ROM drivers and system interfaces (Wetherby, uk), 8) two pilot CD-ROMs (The Hague), and 9) marketing and distribution agreements (Frankfurt).
    That there are seven national libraries participating not the full contingent of eleven is strictly circumstantial; only those libraries which had the personnel available are involved. Of those seven, only the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Royal Library) of the Netherlands, in The Hague, has a permanent library research department. Trudi Noordermeer, one of the two people in that department, explains that over the years the national libraries, which are responsible for maintaining the national bibliographies for their respective countries, have adopted varying versions of the Machine Readable Cataloging (marc) format which they use for compiling the International Standard Bibliographic Descriptions (isbds). Nine variants of marc are in use in Europe alone and this inhibits the exchange of isbd records.

Sorting order
A second significant obstacle the libraries face is incompatible character sets. For example, in the British Library’s blaise filing Rules, � is considered a basic character plus diacritic sorted with A, while for the Swedish library � is a single character sorted after Z. While such problems are not unique to libraries, the volume of information concerned represents a problem a magnitude greater in complexity; the Royal Library in the Hague, for example, has nine million records in its bibliography. The British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale obviously have many more.
    England, Germany, and France have been publishing cdroms jointly for some years now, and part of the Project’s raison d’etre is for other libraries to gain experience with CD-ROM publishing. Two pilot CD-ROMs containing bibliographies from the Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark, and Italy are therefore scheduled to be published in July. These will be distributed freely and feedback will be collected from users.
    “When we began publishing our bibliographies on CD-ROM, we regarded them as tools for other libraries,” says the British Library’s Smith. “One of the surprises has been, however, that they are being used by more and more end-users. Libraries can stick a PC and a CD-ROM player just about anywhere, providing access for the public.” That makes far higher demands, of course, on the user-interface. The consortium considered developing a single interface but dropped that idea early on because it considered it too risky to depend on a single software house. Instead, a broad-based retrieval specification is being developed (Copenhagen) but not the actual software. An eight- or nine-language glossary of standard terms is also being compiled at the French library so that whatever software is developed will be consistent.

Technology testbeds
Getting Europe’s bibliographic records compatible and online is clearly one more way for Europe to build up its multilingual muscle. Equally clear is that it is only a start. Together with ongoing technological developments, it could also dramatically spur on the revolution which is currently taking place in the library world and may contribute to altering our fundamental conception of what a library is. As Trudi Noordermeer says, “libraries have interesting problems but not much money.” As such, they are excellent testbeds for new technologies, a fact which has not escaped the attention of at least several of the world’s computer companies.

Participants in the National Libraries on CD-ROM Project:
Biblioteca Nacional, Lisboa, Portugal
Biblioteca Nazionale di Fiorenze, Florence, Italy
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France
Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen, Denmark
Deutsche Bibliothek, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany
Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, The Netherlands
The British Library, Wetherby, West Yorkshire, UK

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