[11090] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Gabriel, the offical information server for Europe's National Libraries
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Terry Kuny)
Fri Feb 21 02:52:23 1997
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 15:37:46 -0600 (CST)
From: Terry Kuny <Terry.Kuny@xist.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Gabriel, the offical information server for Europe's National Libraries
In 1995 the Conference of European National Librarians launched
a pilot service on the World Wide Web to improve, extend and
expand the dissemination of information about and from their
institutions: Gabriel, Gateway to Europe's National Libraries.
Initially set up by the British Library and the national
libraries of Finland and The Netherlands, this service aims
to achieve comprehensive coverage of European national libraries
within Gabriel. Its major objectives are:
# to provide information on the World Wide Web about national
libraries in a uniform way in several languages;
# to provide convenient online links to sources of information
about their services and collections;
# to give access to all their online services where appropriate;
# to be a bulletin board with news items about the national
libraries
# to give access to all the WWW servers of the national libraries
through a single search service;
# to build collaborative links between European national
libraries in the networking field;
As a pilot service, Gabriel proved to be popular: its pages
were requested hundreds of thousands of times in the first year.
Nowadays, almost a thousand other Internet services point to
Gabriel. To reduce network traffic to and from one server,
Gabriel is currently available on the servers of four national
libraries in Europe.
During the CENL meeting in September 1996 in Lisbon, the CENL
members decided that Gabriel should be launched as an official
service of CENL on behalf of Europe's national libraries on
1 January 1997. The service is supervised and maintained by
a board and a team, in which representatives of 8 national
libraries are comprised. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the
national library of the Netherlands, is responsible for the
overall editorial maintenance of Gabriel. In 1997, new
functionality will be added to the service: new services of
the individual libraries will be added and the results of
collaborative projects will be published through Gabriel.
Gabriel can be accessed at:
http://www.konbib.nl/gabriel/
http://portico.bl.uk/gabriel/
http://renki.helsinki.fi/gabriel/
http://www.ddb.de/gabriel/
Marco de Niet
Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Netherlands
Gabriel editor
marco@python.konbib.nl
