On 3 October 1997 Dr Wim van Drimmelen, Chief Executive of the KB in The Hague, was elected Chairman of the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL). He succeeds Professor Klaus Dieter Lehmann of Die Deutsche Bibliotheek. With an eye to supervising the projects that are carried out under the auspices of the CENL - with financial support from the European Commission - a CENL foundation will be established in the Netherlands.
CENL was founded in 1987, on the initiative of ten countries from the European Community. In the past decade CENL has grown into an active forum for the national librarians of all countries within the Council of Europe. At the request of the European Commission a variety of research projects has been drawn up, originally with a specific focus on the international exchange of bibliographic information. The area of research has in the meantime expanded to the whole field of electronic publications. Central to this are the problems of safeguarding these publications in the long term for the sake of scientific research. Soon the NEDLIB (Networked Deposit Library) project will be launched, which will form the basis for a European deposit library in the form of a network of national libraries. There are nine national libraries and five other organizations taking part in the NEDLIB, including two publishers (Elsevier Science bv and Kluwer Academic Publishers). The Koninklijke Bibliotheek acts as the coordinating partner.
Information about CENL, the national libraries taking part, and the projects can be found at the WWW information service Gabriel
27 October 1997