In the light of DEFF’s relatively brief history large investments have been made via the collaboration in the upgrading of library systems and digitisation of card catalogues and periodicals. Access has been established to licensed electronic resources, and search systems and institutional repositories developed. A collaboration on purchasing has been established with more than 225 institutions with a turnover of over DKK 135 mil. annually in connection with the purchase of licenses for electronic periodicals and databases.

Right from its existence as a project from 1998-2002 and subsequent permanent activity, DEFF has achieved remarkable results to the benefit of the users of the Danish academic, educational and research library sector.

During this period new online catalogues of physical materials were developed, while a migration from printed to digital periodicals with remote access was secured. The objective with this particular endeavour was digitisation of the libraries based on an upgrading of the local library systems (The University Library of Southern Denmark, The State and University Library, The Royal Library and over a hundred more libraries). In the same period DEFF digitised the ’catalogue boxes’ (2.5 mil. catalogue cards and 882,000 references). This formed an important basis for bibliotek.dk

At the beginning the use of licenses was limited to the physical library. Due to a jointly developed system for access management DEFF was able in 2002 to give all Danish researchers and students access to the electronic periodicals and databases round the clock from all computers with Internet connection. The remote access was established by means of a system of proxy servers and uniform application of the LDAP protocol. A significant development of the license collaboration has also taken place, so that today four out of five loans are digital. Over 20% of DEFF’s appropriation was spent on supporting the libraries’ purchase of licenses during the project period.

Apart from this a number of digitisation projects have been completed, a few of which should be mentioned here:

• Weilbach Kunstner Leksikon (37,500 works of art)
• Illustreret Tidende (58,000 pages and 4,000 pictures)
• Archive for Danish Literature (150,000 pages)
• 8 Danish core periodicals (240,000 pages and 25,000 articles)

The last-mentioned project helped to identify flaws in the copyright act and to pave the way for the extended agreement license which was implemented in the act in 2009. DEFF negotiated for instance the possibility for scanning of scientific articles (Copyright Act §16, subsection b).

DEFF has also taken over the Danish Research Database and further developed it as registration system and registrant of Danish research. The system was used particularly for research registration at the Technical University of Denmark (the Orbit system) and provided the inspiration for the PURE system. Moreover, the projects within the area of web archiving were later to form the basis for harvesting and preservation of the ’Danish’ part of the Internet.

In this phase DEFF has i.a. moved closer to the research process. Particularly with focus on research registration with PURE, institutional repositories, integrated search – including data repository. There is also focus on Open Access which is related to activities the purpose of which is to provide free access to research results.

The projects within this area are i.a.:

• Consolidation and further development of local authentication and implementation of CAS in more universities
• Pay-per-view administration system – used by 130 libraries in the Libraries Net Music
• Fedora 1 and 2 – joint development with i.a. Cornell University as well as collaboration with Atira
• Extension of PURE
• Test of institutional repositories
• Preservation of institutional repositories - Pindar
• Support for videnskab.dk
• MILE-SWIM-Learning Objects WEB 
• Development of study and information literacy
• Edumedia – preliminary project on video archives in collaboration with Danish Radio, Research Net and UNI-C
• Many e-learning projects (e.g. DELA – application of web services in learning environment)
• UB test – test of information literacy
• www.stopplagiat.nu/ - initiative against plagiarism
• Open Access reports and projects