13th Conference on Professional Information Resources

Autor: Jill Cousins, The European Library, Netherlands

Fulltext

Abstract:

The European Library provides an integrated point of access to the combined resources (books, magazines, journals... - both digital and non-digital) of the National Libraries of Europe. In under 2 years it has included the digital and non digital collections of 23 National Libraries and aims by the end of 2008 to have created access to all 47 members of CENL (Conference of European National Librarians). The European Library is owned by CENL and has a management structure enabling full participation, sustainability and quick decisions. For these reasons and the technical infrastructure created to enable item level searching across national libraries, The European Library has been asked to help build a European digital library. This European digital library goes beyond national libraries aiming to include all digital cultural heritage collections contained in archives, museums and libraries across Europe. The speech will outline what has been done and what needs to be done to achieve this goal. It will highlight the challenges ahead and try to give a road map for moving from The European Library to a European digital library.

About author:

Jill Cousins is Director of The European Library. She took over from the TEL project and created the operational service The European Library. The success so far of this service has led to the European Union giving their strategic backing to The European Library for the creation of the European digital library. She has a strong web publishing background, having worked for VNU as their European Business Development Director and then transferred the lessons learnt from commercial business-to-business publishing to scholarly publishing working for Blackwell Publishing and several other academic publishers in the UK. Prior to a publishing career, she worked in the online environment for many years, first as a researcher with her own company First Contact (now owned by Thomson). After selling this company Jill worked as the Event & Marketing Director for Online Information. Now combining the skills of web publishing, marketing, research knowledge and business development she heads the growing www.TheEuropeanLibrary.org. Jill holds a Geography degree and a Ph.D in 16th Century Arabic and Turkish Sea Charts.

Author: Javier Hernandez-Ros, European Commission, Luxembourg

Author: Zinaida Manžuch, Vilnius University, Lithuania

Author: Chi-ju Lee, National Library of Korea

Author: Wei Dawei, National Library of China

Author: Adolf Knoll, National Library of the Czech Republic

Co-authors: