Hello, I'm Janet Lees, Community Liaison for OCLC based in Birmingham, UK. I spend a lot of time working with national libraries and consortia in the OCLC EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region. I will be providing a European perspective to Metalogue and highlighting some European projects and initiatives.
I recently spent an interesting and enjoyable week with the 2008 IFLA OCLC Fellows in the Netherlands and Germany. The Class of 2008 had already spent four weeks in the US and my task was to provide a program(me)! that would illustrate European best practice to a range of current challenges. The program combined visits to libraries with theoretical sessions at the OCLC offices and IFLA HQ in the Netherlands. The Fellows seemed surprised at the continuing use of closed access in some obviously very new library buildings such as Leiden University and the different emphasis that this placed on the catalogue and other library services but concluded that both approaches had their merits.
The development of the Leiden University Digital Library here provided a state of the art case study of how to cooperatively agree to support a range of metadata standards to develop a local service which in turn becomes part of the Dutch network of Digital academic repositories (DARE) leading one Fellow to comment "I had expected that the US libraries would have been more advanced than the European ones but I find that they are very much on par."
Having seen very large technical service departments in the US, the Fellows were astounded at the small number of staff working in the technical services department of Amsterdam Public Library. Amsterdam Public Library, like all public and school libraries in the Netherlands, uses a national processing centre NBD Biblion, which provides all library materials shelf ready.
Under whelmed by the availability of 110 OPAC terminals and chip and pin lending stations, the Fellows were more impressed with the 600 internet pcs, the 10am to 10pm x 7days a week opening hours, the walk up and play piano in the entrance foyer, the 2,000 secure bike racks and the roof top restaurant provided for patrons. Does this represent the priorities for future generations of librarians?
We visited two national libraries - the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. In both cases the major issue was digital access to the country's cultural heritage - both onsite and virtually - both national libraries demonstrated exciting projects on how they were tackling the challenge of providing access to their valuable and rich collections via the web. However the most ambitious project we saw was the Europeana project prototype that is planned to launch in November 2008 and aims to provide multilingual access to 2 million digital objects already digitised in Europe's museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections.
Our final visit took us to the University Library Frankfurt am Main where the special collections staff proudly shared some of their treasures from the outstanding Africana Collections, which serve as a national area and subject specialist collection. The Fellows were able to observe the detailed metadata creation process that supports the sub-Saharan Africa subject gateway. This final example brought home to the Fellows the time and effort required of specialist cataloguers to provide "easy" web access to all.
One essential outcome from the IFLA Fellows programme is the networking opportunity it creates and the value of it to all - whilst the Fellows are now back home they are still in contact with us and planning to stay in touch with colleagues on both sides of the pond.
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!