Citation
Stapel, J. (2003), "Koninklijke Bibliotheek National Library of The Netherlands", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 31 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2003.12231aab.004
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2003, MCB UP Limited
Koninklijke Bibliotheek National Library of The Netherlands
Koninklijke Bibliotheek – National Library of The Netherlands
Since 1974, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), National Library of The Netherlands, has collected one specimen of every publication that is published in The Netherlands and has catalogued it for the National Bibliography. Another responsibility of the KB is sustainable preservation and guaranteed accessibility of (electronic) publications. Since the 1990s, the KB has been building up a deposit for Dutch electronic publications and has been exploring long term storage possibilities. In 1999 the KB signed a general agreement with the Dutch Publishers' Association (NUV) on the deposit of electronic publications. This lays an excellent foundation for expanding the depository collection with all kinds of electronic publications. At the end of 2002, IBM provided the KB with the first version of a complete e-deposit system not only for offline electronic publications – such as diskettes and CD-ROMs – but also for complete e-journals. In August 2002 a contract was signed with Elsevier Science, a groundbreaking new agreement in relations between publishers and libraries worldwide in the area of electronic archiving. Thus, the KB became the first official digital archive for all Elsevier Science journals from the first issues onwards.
Contractual restrictions on ILL and copyright conditions appear to be prohibitive in developing delivery and access services to end-users. In general, agreements with publishers do limit online access to information sources to users physically present in the KB building. Although in practice, delivering electronic documents electronically is easy to do, it is not allowed. Therefore, when an ILL request is being processed, KB staff first print the electronic document and then send it by mail, fax or as a scanned image.
Since 1997 the KB has been scanning paper documents and delivering them by e-mail, using RLG's Ariel software. The costs of scanning and sending have decreased significantly. Although the price and quality of the equipment has improved, the number of manual operations involved in the workflow has not dramatically decreased. One important advantage of electronic document delivery is that the handling costs of posting documents can be reduced. In order to encourage users to choose electronic delivery of scanned documents, the price policy in The Netherlands was changed: since January 2002, electronic delivery has been made cheaper than postal delivery, which has caused a significant growth in demand for document delivery via e-mail.
All digital material that is provided by publishers to the KB as a deposit library is temporarily stored and cannot be viewed as full text outside of the KB. The KB's policy aims at acting as a last resort document supplier. The standard conditions of the deposit function are applied to digital collections. In the short term, KB will not develop large-scale electronic document delivery services.
Recent developments in the field of ILL
On the initiative of UKB, a consortium of Dutch academic libraries and the KB, a study will be launched in The Netherlands in 2003. It aims at developing a strategic plan with regard to the national infrastructure needed to make digital publications accessible to researchers, students and citizens (fair use). More information on the outcomes of this initiative will follow in this magazine.
Material that has been digitized by the KB is made available through the Web site. High quality is aimed for, especially when graphic material is involved. The number of page views on the KB Web site proves the great interest from all over the world in the discovery of digitized illuminated manuscripts and mediaeval printed works. We like to believe we are well on our way to putting our digital library on the map and providing our information sources where most users want it: on their desktop.
For a survey on the history of ILL in The Netherlands, please consult "The Dutch Union catalogue: how to overcome history and win the future", a lecture by the General Director of the KB Wim van Drimmelen, on http://www.kb.nl/kb/hcc/costers-en.html.
Johan StapelConsultant User Services/ILL coordinator