Web resource networks for schools in Europe
Because of the strategy of the ETB, the respective repositories are able to define their own roles within the network, which means the whole ETB network is very flexible. This will enable any given repository to only post a subset of records within its database, or ingest only metadata records within a specific project. In addition the ETB network includes a central repository where each participating repository can define its own set of type and content rules and filter rules. In fact the local rules that govern the posting and ingesting of records from the ETB network are based upon very different types of criteria. These include the target audience, the language of resource, the language of metadata and the knowledge of quality criteria used by specific repositories and the topic of resource. Therefore all these degrees of repository flexibility make the ETB network very robust indeed and are core to the network's ability to participate on a wide range of levels. The success of the ETB network is largely based upon the combination of two elements that deal with different levels of resources. One level deals with individual resources whilst the other identifies the entire collection of resources. These combined levels are thus able to contain terms of controlled multilingual vocabularies and the multilingual ETB thesaurus, which is the main browse and search element. Hence the ETB presents the Schoolnet Information Space project with the individual repository rules to facilitate the location of relevant resources, irrespective of the indexing methods used.
