Objective
The interlibrary loan system of books is one of the central services of national, university, and research libraries throughout Europe. Millions of volumes are shipped every year. Nevertheless, the interlibrary lending of books is a time-consuming, ineffective and expensive activity: The book has to be shipped from the lending library to the borrowing library and back again just to satisfy the request of one single user. In contrast to that, our books2u! project will set up a new service that will invest the time and money presently used for shipping into scanning and digitally reformatting the requested book. The user will thus be able to view the page images on a web site.
Work description:
The project is intended to be a pilot service for digitising books instead of shipping them to the user. The new service will be conducted by two university libraries. More than 15,000 books are shipped by two libraries per year. Last but not least both libraries have been collaborating with the software supplier, a university department, for several years and have jointly developed a digital library software package. This free, open-source, and platform-independent software package will be used as a basis although it has to be enhanced and adapted to the special workflow within the proposed service.
The functionality covered by the software already includes:
(1) the metadata capturing according to existing library standards,
(2) the management of the digital objects which derive from the digital conversion process (linking together metadata, page images, OCRd full text),
(3) the linking between the digital objects and the national OPAC in order to provide access not only from the document server but also from the national compound catalogue and
(4) the complete functionality of the document server (e.g. including search and browse facilities, tiff2gif and pdf conversion on the fly).
To meet the challenges of the new service adaptations have to be made towards the workflow, the integration into the charging system and the user-friendliness of the interfaces. Apart from the technical tasks, work will be carried out in the fields of copyright (in order to enlarge the repertoire of books which will be made accessible to the public) and the dissemination of the results. A feasibility study will outline the current status of the interlibrary loan system in Europe and compare it to the experience gained by books2u!
Milestones:
Milestone I: System design (month 3)
Milestone II: Software (month 10)
Milestone III: End of project. Feasibility study, copyright model agreements (18)
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
ACM - Preparatory, accompanying and support measuresCoordinator
6020 INNSBRUCK
Austria