Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands
Department for IT & Automation & Library Research Department
ELAG progress report 1997-1998
Introduction
In February 1997 the General Board of Directors of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) ratified the
Information Systems Strategy for the years 1997-1999. The most important goals for the information
systems strategy in the KB were formulated as follows:
1. Consolidation of the current operational IT-infrastructure in order to improve customer satisfaction.
2. Increase of service level and introduction of new services.
3. Support innovative projects in which information-technology plays a prominent and essential part.
LIBRARY AUTOMATION
The Advanced Information Workstations, the state-of-the-art public terminals of the KB, have been
migrated to version 2 in the spring of 1997. The new version adds extra facilities as subject guides, payfor-print and additional user software. Special attention has been paid to the maintenance and
documentation of the workstation infrastructure. Additional AIW workstations have replaced many of the
old fashioned character based video terminals. In November 1997 the workstation has been incorporated
in the networked information service of the KB, Alexicon. This has led to a fully redesigned and
restructured information service (http://www.konbib.nl/).
Preparation for migration of the Library system from VAX/VMS to Alpha/UNIX platform has been
started. The migration is planned for June 1998.
The Deposit of Dutch Electronic Publications has migrated from the original AT&T Right Pages platform
to a new system, IBM Digital Library. AT&T didn't develop nor support their system any longer. In the
selection proces also ICL-Commands and Orion's Science Server have been tested; both appeared too
limited in relation to our functional specifications. The implementation of IBM Digital Library started in
April 1997. It was fully operational in January 1998. Further development to accomodate al least 400 GB
storage of electronic publications is planned for 1998.
Security Policy has been determined. Implementation has been planned for 1998.
OFFICE AUTOMATION
Major effort was spent on the preparation for the migration from DOS to Windows-NT of the
workstations of the employees. Almost all the hardware has been replaced and workstations are now
powerful enough to run "Windows-NT 4 advanced workstation operating system". The hardware and
software components of the office automation server have been enhanced and a netwerk management
system has been added. The server is based on Novell Netware 4.12 (Intranetware) and Novell
Managewise will take care of centralised management of the servers and the workstations. The roll-out of
the migration of workstations will take place in 1998.
The first phase of the e-mail migration from the old X400 based to a new Internet-based system has been
completed. Internal mail is still based on the Word Perfect Office mail structure, but external mail is fully
Internet-compliant. In 1998 the e-mail structure will be completely migrated
A new worktime tracking system has been installed to replace the old, DOS based system. The new
system, made by Interflex, is based on Windows-NT and offers improved data collection terminals, much
more stable software and improved reporting.
THE PROJECTS
During the reporting year the Koninklijke Bibliotheek has been involved in a large number of national and
international projects. Some of these projects are summarized below. Most of the projects are staffed from
two departments within the KB: Library Research and Information Technology & Automation. If you should
like to have more information on a project, please send an e-mail (or fax) to the contact person.
The projects BIBLINK, DESIRE, NEDLIB and MASTER are sponsored by the European Commission and
run within the Libraries programme from DGXIII. GABRIEL is a European project too but it's financed by
CENL instead of the European Commission. DUTCHESS, DNEP-IWI, DONOR and CERBERUS are
national projects.
The project BIBLINK will deliver an interactive prototyp/demonstration system which will enable publishers
of electronic documents to input and transmit an agreed minimum level of data describing the documents to
national bibliographic services; and will allow the national bibliographic agencies to enrich the data and
transmit tot the publishers. The prototype will employ an agreed standard format for transmission and will
convert as necessary to library-based MARC formats for use by the national libraries. Provision will also be
made for the encryption and authentication processing of electronic documents necessary to preserve their
integrity. Projectleader: British Library. KB contact person: trudi@python.konbib.nl
DESIRE, Development of a European Service for Information on Research and Education, started the 1st of
January 1996 within the framework of the Telematics Applications Programme of the European Commission.
SURFnet co-ordinates the project. The main aim of Desire is to optimize the use of the WWW-technology to
offer European scholars better service. The most important fields of research are: indexing and cataloguing,
caching, security, authoring tools, quality of service, training and last but not least home office. The KB
concentrates primarely on indexing. The proposal for the continuation of DESIRE, DESIRE II, has been put
forward to the European Commission. KB contact person: titia@python.konbib.nl
NEDLIB will develop an architecture for national libraries which is capable of processing electronic
publications regardless of origin and for access either by end users or by archiving organisations. At the same
time the commercial and copyright interests of publishers will be handled through access controls
implemented when the publication is stored and activated when it is accessed. The architecture will be
specified to address 'today's access' and to ensure 'future proofing' to minimise the overhead on national
libraries and promote real interoperability. The project started the first of January 1998 and will last for three
years. KB contact person: titia@python.konbib.nl
The objective of MASTER, Manuscript Access through STandards for Electronic Records, is to develop a
common description model of manuscripts. It has got to be a kind of short-title model that may serve as an
entrance for a search, whereupon the user is referred to a more detailed description. In the light of the project
every participating library will make 2000 test descriptions, which will be linked to a common Website. The
Website can contain about a million descriptions. There are work packages dealing with the design of the
model, the development of applications for MARC and SGML, the creation of a Website and the
development of test descriptions. This European project will start probably in the summer of 1998. The KB
participates in a number of work packages. KB contact person: ad.leerintveld@konbib.nl
At the request of CENL three national libraries (UK, NL and SF) started the development for a network
service which provides online links to online services and collections from all national libraries in Europe.
The name of this information service is GABRIEL, GAteway to and BRIdge between European national
Libraries. The online library guide is being provided in three different languages (URL:
http://www.konbib.nl/gabriel/). During the CENL-meeting in September 1996 it was decided to reverse the
pilot version of Gabriel into an official operational service. The KB is responsible for the maintenance and
updating of the service, assisted by colleagues from eight other national libraries. In October 1997 a workshop
was organised by the Gabriel team for the webmasters of the European national libraries. KB contact person:
pieter.douma@konbib.nl
The aim of DUTCHESS is to develop a system based on the common Dutch classification scheme, to open
up scholarly relevant Internet resources (URL: http://www.konbib.nl/dutchess/ ). Subject indexing specialists of
the KB and a number of other Dutch research libraries select and deliver resources. After screening by a local
committee, the resources are sent to the KB and adopted by NBC. The development and maintenance of NBC
as a national operational service and technical innovation are the main purposes of the project. Minor aims of
NBC are the coordination of local efforts, research and development. KB contact person:
marianne@python.konbib.nl
DNEP-IWI is a project that researches the several elements of the building of an electronic deposit library. It
is important to store and preserve the electronic publications in a sufficient way. Apart from that it is
important that access to the material is guaranteed. The right approach can only evolve from trial and error
because of a lack of experience with handling electronic publications. To evaluate the aspects of delivery and
accessibility, a test environment will be created, based on a number of chosen solutions. A deposit collection
made up of hundred electronic publications will be tested in 1997. During the experiment the necessary
agreements with publishers about copyright issues will be taken into account. KB contact person:
trudi@python.konbib.nl
The objective of DONOR is to improve networked resource discovery in the Netherlands. It is proposed
to realise this objective: by establishing and enabling infrastructure for information management, based on
Internet methods and technologies, and by enhancing metadata awareness with information producers on
the net. The DONOR infrastructure will first be implemented for the national research network in the
Netherlands: SURFnet. All Dutch institutions for research and higher education that publish on the Web
will be encouraged to participate in DONOR and to apply DONOR standards, tools and methods such as:
a metadata-generator for Web-publications, methods and tools for document-structuring, methods and
tools for document-version control, and the unique identification of publications on the Web. On the
discovery side, developers of search engines and information gateways will be encouraged to make their
systems metadata aware in order to ensure the take-up of DONOR standards and methods. SURFnet
Search Engines in particular will be adapted to DONOR. The project is scheduled to start in the first half
of 1998 and will last 2 years. KB contact point: titia@python.konbib.nl
The project CERBERUS is carried out by KB in 1998 together with the Department of Mathematics and
Informatics of a technical university and two university libraries. CERBERUS is concerned with the
integrity and authenticity of electronic publications in a deposit. The objective of such a deposit is to keep
the electronic documents accessible on the very long term. For this preservation it is necassary to handle
the documents, e.g. migrate the data from one carrier to another, convert from one operating system or
format to another or to emualate the old environment by new hardware and software. What happens when
these actions are carried out? Is a ceratin percentage of the information or the lay out lost? Is this perhaps
acceptable for certain types of organisations? The project is financed by IWI, Innovation of Scientific
Information Provision and the results will be applicable for libraries, archives and other organisations
which have the duty to keep machine readable records available on the very long term. The KB contact
person is: trudi@python.konbib.nl