Tietolinja

Tietolinja
News 1/1999


EDITORIAL

ARTICLES


Gabriel - Gateway to Europe's National Libraries

Juha Hakala






Gabriel, Gateway to Europe's National Libraries, has evolved in a few years time from humble beginnings to a popular information service, used hundreds of thousands times annually. This article describes the history and current status of the service, and unveils some of the future plans of the Gabriel developers.

History

Many of the national libraries were among the early users of the World Wide Web. It is therefore not surprising that the idea of creating common Web-based services was presented quite early, at the 1994 Oslo meeting of the Conference of European National Libraries. There a proposal was made that national libraries should have an electronic notice board available to one another as a means of keeping up-to-date with current activities. The Finnish national library proposed that this should be achieved through the use of the World Wide Web.

As a result of this proposal, which was widely supported, a short paper called Creation and Maintenance of a WWW Information System for National Libraries was written in Helsinki University Library. This text already incorporated the Gabriel design in embryonic form. In short, it was suggested that a common homepage should be established. Under this homepage, there should be "standardised" descriptions of each national library.

The proposal led to initiation by CENL in March 1995 of a project, whose task was to design and establish a functional service according to the guidelines presented in the proposal. In Gabriel general information page (http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/gabriel/en/about-gabriel.html) the subsequent development is shortly described:

An ad hoc meeting was held in The Hague on 27 March 1995, at which representatives of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, British Library and Helsinki University Library met to discuss the proposed CENL WWW. Objectives were set out at the meeting and an action schedule agreed. Supported by Prof. Dr. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann (Deutsche Bibliothek), as CENL Chairman, these three libraries set up the pilot Gabriel project. A number of other national libraries agreed to participate in the pilot: Die Deutsche Bibliothek; Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Biblioteka Narodowa (Poland). Working together, these libraries created a functional pilot service based on entries describing their own services and collections between March and September 1995. The pilot service was endorsed by the CENL annual meeting at Bern in Switzerland in September 1995 and launched on the Internet.

Project team members were Graham Jefcoate and Andrew Ford (British Library), Marco de Niet (Koninklijke bibliotheek), Juha Hakala (Helsinki University Library), Ute Schwens, Renate Goempel (Die Deutsche Bibiliothek) and Ewa Krysiak (Biblioteka Narodowa).

Initially Gabriel incorporated information only from the libraries, which had participated in the pilot. In November 1995 all the other CENL libraries were asked to deliver their information. In practice this meant that each library had to deliver a general description (see for instance http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/gabriel/en/countries/netherlands.html for description of the national library of the Netherlands) and information about its accessible on-line services, linked to the general description page. Today this sounds elementary, but in 1995 only a minority of the CENL member libraries had Web servers and working knowledge of HTML. As of this writing these things are of course familiar to national libraries.

The experimental service created at this stage satisfied the CENL participants. 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 editorial maintenance of Gabriel was taken over by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands. It still takes care of the maintenance and editing of the service, with support from the colleagues of the National Libraries of Finland, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Each library is responsible of keeping their own files up to date.

The Gabriel service is managed by a Board. Its functions are to set policy, approve strategic plans, identify/allocate resources and to report to CENL on progress. In 1997/1998 Gabriel board comprised the directors of five national libaries:

  • Prof. Klaus-Dieter Lehmann (Die Deutsche Bibliothek (DDB), chair of Gabriel Board)
  • Dr. Wim van Drimmelen (Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), The Netherlands, chair of CENL)
  • Dr. Brian Lang (The British Library)
  • Vilenka Jakac-Bizjak (Narodna in univerzitetna knjiznica v Ljubljani, Slovenia)
  • Dr. Hans Marte (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek)

Pieter Douma, editor-in-chief of the Internet service of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek has been the Gabriel editor from January 1998 onwards. The British Library still maintains the Gabriel search engine and the archives of the Gabriel email lists on their server.

Mission

Gabriel mission statement (http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/gabriel/en/mission-en.html) states that:

The mission of Gabriel is to provide information about Europe's National Libraries, their collections and their services in order to facilitate access to them, and to foster the development of new services based on a shared infrastructure.

To achieve this mission, the following general objectives have been defined:

  • Guidance - Gabriel serves as a comprehensive and up-to-date online guide to the functions, collections and services of Europe's National Libraries;
  • Promotion - Gabriel promotes the National Libraries of Europe in every appropriate way;
  • Co-operation - Gabriel supports the building of collaborative links between European National Libraries in the networking field;
  • Model - Gabriel serves as a model for other shared networked services in the library field in Europe and elsewhere.

The present Gabriel fulfils all these objectives. It is definitely comprehensive and up-to-date due to continuous updates, listed in the New in Gabriel -page at http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/gabriel/en/new.html.

According to the statistics collected from the four Gabriel sites, Gabriel was in June 1997 - July 1998 accessed approximately 50.000 times per month. Annual growth of Gabriel usage from the previous year was 34 %. Actually the he real usage is more than 50.000, since like other popular pages, Gabriel pages are often stored in and retrieved from Web cache services.

The pages of the Helsinki University Library are used about 3.500 times every month, or more than 100 times daily. It is obvious that Gabriel is for us one of the major means with which we can inform the end users abroad and in Finland about our services. As promotional system Gabriel is obviously a success.

Gabriel has also fostered co-operation between the CENL libraries in an effective way. In its early stages it proved the power of the Web based services to the national libraries. As of this writing Gabriel can be used to demonstrate more recent Web developments, such as Java, style sheets and metadata, to the CENL members.

Gabriel does indeed serve as a model to other shared network services. But its applicability is somewhat limited: the information within or accessed via Gabriel is freely available, so there was no need to think about access control or billing procedures. Technical infrastructure the project needed was already available; in this respect the project was actually very simple, although without the Web it would have been very difficult to establish a service like Gabriel. The crucial prerequisite for the project was the political will of the national libraries to set up a common information service.

Gabriel services

Gabriel is currently available on five sites:

The mirror site in Slovenia was added in Autumn 1998. The version in the national library of the Netherlands is the primary one; other Gabriels are only copies of the Dutch one, maintained by automatic mirroring or at least semi-automatic copying of files. This guarantees that all Gabriel sites are up to date. There are no immediate plans to add more European sites, but there have been preliminary discussions about mirroring Gabriel to e.g. the Web server of the National Library of Australia.

From the humble beginnings Gabriel has changed in three years into a mature service with extensive contents, including:

  • uniform presentation of information about the National Libraries;
  • support of multilinguality (English, German and French)
  • a geographical guide and a systematical guide to the services of the National Libraries;
  • a shared search engine for the WWW services of the National Libraries;
  • a central helpdesk;
  • a bulletin board with news items about the National Libraries;
  • an electronic archive for publications of the National Libraries;
  • a survey of partnerships and projects in which the National Libraries are involved.

As of this writing all CENL countries have delivered their descriptions, although all three languages are not always supported. Moreover, descriptions of on-line services are sometimes missing. In spite of these hopefully temporary omissions Gabriel is the most exhaustive and up-to-date source of information about the European national libraries.

Some Gabriel information items are not yet comprehensive. For instance, libraries have not been very active in sending news items to Gabriel, probably because they feel that most newsworthy things are of domestic interest only. This may be a wrong conclusion, since the problems the national libraries face, especially when they are dealing with the Internet and electronic documents, are often shared.

Gabriel team not only maintains the existing service, but adds new content to the system. As of this writing Koninklijke bibliotheek is preparing an exhibition of highlights from the collections of the national libraries. It will be made available for the users in 1999.

From contents point of view there are four levels to be distinguished in Gabriel: the Gabriel Home Page; pages with information on a European level; pages for individual libraries and pages for on-line services in these libraries. In http://www.lib.helsinki.fi/gabriel/en/about-gabriel.html, these pages has been described in a following way:

The Gabriel Home Page

The Home Page is accommodated on a single screen, and can be accessed easily and quickly. It is designed to be attractive, but does not contain large image files that would delay loading unduly.

As of this writing the Home Page is available in English, French and German. The Home Page offers a choice of language and a choice of server. Each participating library can add a version in other languages on its own server as required.

The Home Page contains links to all the various services of Gabriel on the second level. There are also links to Bibliotheca Universalis and CoBRA+ -projects.

The Second Level

Pages at this level offer information about national libraries from a European perspective. These pages are also available in three languages. Once a user has chosen a language on the Home Page, it will be supported at this level as well.

The pages at this level contain the following:

  • Information about Gabriel
  • Public information about CENL and collaborative projects among CENL members; this page will also offer restricted access to a site with documents for internal CENL use only
  • News items (about special projects; major changes within individual libraries; significant new services; etc.)
  • A text listing in alphabetical order by country. This page gives access to information about individual CENL members (the third level);
  • A text listing of various types of online services, maintainted by national libraries
  • A Web index based on harvester / search engine Muscat, with which all the public information on Gabriel and the WWW servers that can be accessed from Gabriel is indexed
  • A comments and feedback form, with which users can express opinions about Gabriel. The users have not been very active in providing comments, and therefore we would appreciate getting more comments.

The Third Level

At this level information about individual national libraries is provided. After selecting a country/library at level 2, the user is presented with information about the history, policy, important collections and services of the national library concerned, taken from a base file on Gabriel.

The library descriptions are concise, but do provide users basic information in an easily accessible form.

The Fourth Level

At the fourth level, links are offered to pages in which online services of the chosen library are described, e.g. WWW servers; OPACs; national union catalogues; national bibliographies; special databases, etc. Relevant background information on e.g. how to log in (if appropriate) is incorporated.

The online services maintained by the national libraries provide Internet users a surprising wealth of information resources for free. The very extent of these services is the best explanation of why Gabriel is important and why it has become so popular in such a short time. Since national libraries provide a lot of vitally important services, we must also tell the Internet users about them. Gabriel is one means of doing this, means that is optimised to the current Internet environment. Since Gabriel is now a stable service, it is reasonable to expect that Gabriel will remain a relevant and exhaustive information dissemination tool also in the years to come.

Juha Hakala, Development Manager
Helsinki University Library
Email: Juha.Hakala@helsinki.fi

Tietolinja News 1/1999