Chairman: Arne Sørensen

The programme group considers its main task to be to establish collaboration about the infrastructure and consolidate solutions for the research libraries. The area’s action plan, which was approved at the beginning of 2009, therefore has just one overall objective:

Establishment of actual common components and common operating solutions for the libraries.

Action plan, list of group members, minutes from meetings held in the programme group, project applications etc. can be seen on the programme group’s wiki: http://arkitektur.deff.wikispaces.net.

In 2009 there have been six active projects. The three that have received grants for 2009 are:

The basic idea of the project is to support a dynamic process where the records in the union catalogue at any time are updated to an ideal quality level, and where the individual libraries can link their local versions of the record to the union record, so that common updating is automatically spread everywhere. Full implementation, however, seems not likely to succeed, but in a number of sub-areas good results have been achieved. DBC (Danish Library Center) can, for example, now offer record enhancements to the local libraries via DanBib’s cluster concept. The project has moreover analysed the possibilities for the introduction of common tools for choice of materials and cataloguing. Such common tools will enable the research libraries to cooperate on purchase and cataloguing.

The project has had two objectives – both of which have succeeded. First of all – to improve the basis for re-use cataloguing via access to Worldcat, which is the world’s largest catalogue of physical library material, and secondly to present Danish libraries’ materials more systematically in Worldcat, thereby encouraging international loans from Danish libraries. The project is similar to DanBib as genuine union catalogue, but as opposed to this the Worldcat project does not actually change anything in the usual working processes in the libraries.

Support for the project has therefore been completely unambiguous, and the result is now full operation via services from DBC.

The project is a consolidation project, which can mean both streamlining and service improvements. The project group, which is broadly constituted with representation from all the major research libraries, has at several workshops been analysing the DEFF libraries’ existing e-resource administration, been looking at selected ERM systems and gathered experiences from abroad. The motivation for the introduction of ERMS is that e-resource purchases are heavy on the library budgets, but the tools for administration have not been able to keep up. There is a need for more knowledge-sharing between employees, uniform processes, continuity in the work and finally efficient exploitation of the means spent on e-resources. The project group submitted its report at the beginning of 2010 and recommends that a process be initiated for the purchase of a consortium ERMS.

The programme group’s action plan contains a number of activities that have not yet been formulated as actual projects. Among those are a common link resolver and common proxy, which have both been assessed at drafting level during 2009, but are in abeyance as the benefit of a common solution is considered to be minimal. We are then left with three projects supposed to be established in 2010:

The idea is to pick up anonymized data on user behaviour in, and not least across, systems and across Danish libraries. Among possible applications we should mention studies of user behaviour, recommendation systems, ranking of results, optimization of the e-license portfolio and statistics.

The project is to prepare the establishment of a data well of actual Danish material. The idea has been discussed at several meetings in the programme group, and has recently been coupled with the work with persistent identifiers (reliable names or references to net documents) in the Knowledge Exchange collaboration. In 2010 a project is expected to be established which explicitly incorporates the content of The Royal Library’s and the State and University Library’s archives as well as the research publication in the universities’ PURE systems.

It is a question of extension and expansion of existing services of document deliveries, where the starting point as a rule is a paper edition, but the form of delivery is electronic. As an example one might mention the State and University Library’s e-copy service, which in 2010 is expected to be extended to include all Danish periodicals.