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Origins and overview of the projectWhen I was asked to give a presentation on the work of the InterParty project the working title that first occurred to me was "From library authority files to ecommerce". This seemed to capture the thought that we were pushing boundaries by applying the familiar principles and benefits of library authority files to the management of e-content by working in co-operation with publishing and trade sectors for whom authority control is not a familiar notion. On reflection I think it is a more accurate reflection of the key drivers of the project to reverse the caption to read "From e-commerce to library authority files". For in fact this is a project initiated by people working in the trade sector who have identified a "problem" and seen part of the solution as pre-existing in library authority files. I hope to show in this presentation that, although InterParty is not a library-led project, it does offer to open up potential new partnerships that would greatly benefit authority control work in libraries.What is the InterParty project? It is a project, funded by the European Commission, which aims to develop a mechanism that will enable the interoperation of identifiers for "parties". The term "party" is simply a useful term with which to draw together the disparate types of identities responsible for the creation of intellectual property or "content", such as authors, composers, performers (including groups), producers, directors, publishers, collecting societies and even libraries. The project brings together partners from the book industry, people involved in rights management, libraries and identifier & technology communities; all of whom share a common interest in the accurate identification of "parties" in relation to "content" for varying purposes.Specifically the partners are: EDItEUR (the co-ordinating partner, a European organisation founded by European Federations of Library, Booksellers and Publishers Associations to co-ordinate the development, promotion and implementation of EDI in the books and serials sector); the British Library; the Royal Swedish Library; IFLA; Book Data (a leading supplier of bibliographic data to all sectors of the book supply chain in the UK); Kopiosto (a leading copyright agency operating across all the creative media sectors in Finland). US-based partners, not funded by the EC, are: the Library of Congress; OCLC; the International DOI foundation and CNRI (Corporation for National Research Initiatives). The original idea for the project was an outcome of another EC project (Interoperability of Data for eCommerce Systems). was similarly concerned with transactions in content and how they can be effectively controlled in a web environment. In its analysis proposed that descriptions of content, transactions and descriptions of rights are all inextricably linked, and recognised that accurate descriptions of content are the core on which the rest is based. Consequently the key outcomes of that project were the definition ...

If library users are expected to reserve, renew, issue and return books without the intervention of library staff, they must surely be expected to select the items themselves as well. Andrew MacEwan describes how a new fiction indexing initiative by the British Library will offer subject‐based access to fiction, to allow users to use subject matter as the basis of choice in the same way as non‐fiction.