Initiated by the Conference of European National Libraries (CENL), the Nedlib-project16 is a collaboration of eight national libraries in Europe. Launched on January 1st, 1998, the initiative received funding from the European Commission's Telematics Application Programme. Officially, the project completed in December 2000 [Ken01b].
Headed by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek of the Netherlands other national libraries participating are those of France, Norway, Finland, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, and Italy. Further partners include a national archive and three major publishers, namely Kluwer Academic, Elsevier Science, and Springer-Verlag.
The Nedlib-project aims at bringing together the strategies pursued by European national libraries tackling the extension of their scope to digital documents. It contributes to an emerging infrastructure for digital deposit libraries providing a common architectural framework and basic tools. Thereby, the foundations for a networked European deposit library are laid.
The main goal is to ensure long-term preservation of both, on-line and off-line digital publications. This objective is not approached by offering a stand-alone monolithic system, but a "plug-in" framework is provided that can be embedded in already existing infrastructures. By this flexible model the requirements of all participants are tried to be accommodated. Guidelines and technical standards are proposed to bring in a common basis enabling close cooperation and, hence, spreading research costs. Additionally, Nedlib forms a forum for the exchange of knowledge and best practices.
Subsumed under the generic architecture of a deposit system for electronic publications (dSEP) process models have been identified and formalised, that basically cover all steps from the acquisition of the documents, via access provision, to their long-term archivation [vdWD00]. These building blocks can be implemented separately and integrated in a complete digital library system. Further supporting this feature has been the formulation of the modules adhering to the OAIS-standard (cf. Section 3.6).
Practical work has been done, implementing the specifications formulated for the high level models and in order to refine them. Experiments with the preservation of digital documents have been performed. Also, some tools have been developed in the scope of the project. Among those is the Nedlib-Harvester, a robot that acquires on-line data (cf. Section 4.4). Its realisation has been suggested by the Helsinki University Library. The national library of Germany (cf. Section 3.4) has developed a system for multimedia access. The real success of the the Nedlib-project will be seen in the coming years, as national libraries establish their infrastructure for a digital deposit library, implementing and adhering to its results.