International Library Resources

Bibliotheca Baltica
Working Group comprising 38 institutional members from the ten countries arround the Baltic Sea: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Danmark. The aim is to promote cooperation between libraries in the Baltic Sea Area, to to give guidance on collections of All-Baltic-Interest, to initiate projects in describing collections, virtual or digitized, and to serve scholars engageged in Baltic Sea Area Studies.

Bibliotheca Universalis
Bibliotheca Universalis is one of the eleven G7 projects launched during the G7 Information Society conference held in Brussels in February 1995. The main objective of Bibliotheca Universalis is to make the major works of the world's scientific and cultural heritage accessible to a vast public via multimedia technologies, thus fostering the exchange of knowledge and dialogue over national and international borders. The aim is to exploit existing digitization programs in order to build up a large distributed virtual collection of knowledge and make it available via the global communication networks, enhancing the services to the end users. In this way, it is hoped to advance international cooperation towards the establishment of a global electronic library system.

CANDLE (Controlled Access to Network Digital Libraries in Europe)
CANDLE will facilitate access to digital collections within and outside the library in a controlled way by producing low-cost library management software for rights control and fee management. In collaboration with a publisher and a supply agency, a number of economic delivery models will be tested.

Conference of European National Librarians (CENL)
The Conference of European National Librarians is a foundation under Dutch law with the aim of increasing and reinforcing the role of national libraries in Europe, in particular in respect of their responsibilities for maintaining the national cultural heritage and ensuring the accessibility of knowledge in that field. Members of CENL are the national librarians of all Member States of the Council of Europe. The conference currently Franconsists of 47 members from 45 European countries. The European Commission has subsidized various CENL projects.

Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL)
The Consortium was formed in 1992 on the initiative of research libraries in many European countries and legally came into being in June 1994. CERL’s primary objective is to record all books printed in Europe during the hand-press period, i.e. before c.1830, in a machine-readable catalogue, called the Hand Press Book Database. Two other significant initiatives are the development of the CERL Thesaurus and the CERL Portal.

eContentplus
Four-year program (2005–08) established by the European Commission to tackle organisational barriers and promote take up of leading-edge technical solutions to improve acessibility and usability of digital material in a multilingual environment. The Program addresses specific market areas where development has been slow: geographic content (as a key constituent of public sector content), educational content, cultural, scientific and scholarly content. The Program also supports EU-wide co-ordination of collections in libraries, museums and archives and the preservation of digital collections so as to ensure availability of cultural, scholarly and scientific assets for future use.

European Digital Library (EDL)
EDLproject is a Targeted Project funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus Programme and coordinated by the German National Library. The project works towards the integration of the bibliographic catalogues and digital collections of the National Libraries of Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain and Sweden, into The European Library.

European Information Association (EIA)
The European Information Association (EIA) is an international body of information specialists whose aim is to develop, co-ordinate and improve access to EU information. Members include public, academic and government libraries; information units of professional and voluntary groups; European Documentation Centres; Euro Info Centres; law firms; local authorities; publishers; and companies.

The European Library
The European Library, hosted by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek / National Library of The Netherlands, is a portal which offers access to the combined resources (books, magazines, journals.... - both digital and non-digital) of the 45 national libraries of Europe. It offers free searching and delivers digital objects - some free, some priced.

LBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche)
LIBER is the principal association of the major research libraries of Europe. It was founded in 1971 under the auspices of the Council of Europe, and its current membership includes research libraries of more than thirty countries.

NARCISSE (Network of Art Research Computer Image Systems in Europe)
Research and development project of the European Commission's Directorate General XIII (Telecommunications, Information Market, and Exploitation of Research), NARCISSE is aimed at creating a high-resolution image bank and multilingual information retrieval system. The images are principally scientific documents made from paintings undergoing conservation. The documentation records consist of information about the paintings, original images, and conservation of the works. NARCISSE has adopted the data standard developed by the International Committee for Documentation's (CIDOC) Data and Terminology Working Group for the analysis of the text information. A lexicon of standard terminology has been prepared and translated into seven languages.

Telematics for Libraries (1990-98)
This site provides core information on the work carried out by the European Commission in the libraries field under the Third and Fourth Framework Programmes for Research and Technological Development, Telematics for Libraries, from 1990 to 1998.

TEL-ME-MOR
TEL-ME-MOR (The European Library: Modular Extensions for Mediating Online Resources) was a project funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme of the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. The project lasted from 1 February 2005 to 31 January 2007 and had two main objectives: (1) to support the 10 national libraries from the New Member States, which are partners in the project, in becoming full members of The European Library; and (2) to stimulate and facilitate the participation of organisations from the New Member States of the European Union in projects funded within the IST area.

Western European Studies Section (WESS)
The Western European Studies Section (WESS) represents librarians and others who specialize or are otherwise professionally involved in the acquisition, organization, and use of information sources originating in or related to Western European countries. Our aim is to promote the improvement of library services supporting study and research in Western European affairs from ancient times to the present.

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