The European National Libraries Cooperative Project on CD-ROM: Results,Experiences and Perspectives

Abstract

In 1989 a consortium of the national libraries of Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and the UK agreed to cooperate in investigating CD-ROMs as means a of distributing and using national bibliographic data. The project, which was divided into ten manageable sub-projects, was launched in January 1990. One major result is a draft specification of requirements for a common retrieval interface for bibliographic data, designed to match as closely as possible the needs of four user groups: acquisition librarians, cataloguers, reference librarians and end users. A second is the production of a pilot CD-ROM in UNIMARC, The Explorers, containing records from the national bibliographies of Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal. Other major products are MARC to UNIMARC conversion tables, and a multilingual interface. Valuable if sometimes painful experience was gained during the project.