Based on the initiative of the IST TEL project
a fully operational digital library service has been launched recently,
which is now owned by the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL)
and funded for three years by nine national libraries and CENL. The aim
of the TEL project was to develop a pan European distributed digital library
with integrated multilingual access, based on European national digital
collections, hospitable to other resources and widely accessible to Europe’s
citizens.
This was achieved and the project resolved some significant issues in
usability, access to digital objects, scalability and interoperability.
The TEL project has successfully mutated into The European Library Office,
which gives access to 12,000,000 records and objects from the nine National
Libraries of Britain, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands,
Portugal, Slovenia and Switzerland. The range of the collections is wide,
with a strong emphasis on the Arts and Humanities.
