Gabriel, the offical information server for Europe's National
Libraries ... (with apologies for cross-posting).
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/
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