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PurposeThe purpose of this article is to present an overview of The European Library as a portal and discuss the issues of usability this gives in delivery of multicultural, multilingual access to the cultural heritage in Europe's National Libraries.Design/methodology/approachThe approach is a description of the service its business model, management structure and technical base with an emphasis on how this does or does not work for the user.FindingsPortals are not great user experiences. This is further complicated in the case of The European Library by the language barrier for search and retrieval across national boundaries. However, the existence of The European Library is at least of accessing material that would otherwise remain only accessible within the library itself. It is also a big step towards the creation of a European Digital Library.Originality/valueThe paper discusses more of the effects of such a portal on the user than has elsewhere been published. The value is in its description of collaborative working, its example of a management and organisational structure, its working business model and the technical solution that sits behind it. As an example of creating cross country and cultural access to digitised information it has been successful to date.

The role of the Digital Object Identifier in allowing users to access required information with the minimum of effort and then to link to other relevant information is discussed. Its application to a commercial service at a high level of granularity, http://www.BlackwellSynergy.com, the online journal website of Blackwell Publishing Ltd, is described. The paper covers services for the user such as deep linking and discovery, services for the publisher such as viral marketing tools as well as a definition of an information object, and a possible future for the DOI.

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Launched in March 2005, The European Library is the operational result of a 3-year European Union funded project to create a cooperative framework and specify a system for integrated access to the major collections of the European national libraries. The project included the rudiments of a business plan and, unusually for a European Union project, intended from the beginning to try to make an operational service. The project gave proof of concepts in both technology and cooperative working across national boundaries. At the end of the project the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) adopted The European Library and an Office was set up within the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Netherlands in May 2004. From June 2004 work was undertaken to turn the project and the experimental technology into a fully fledged robust service. The European Library will give access to digital and non-digital records and items from nine European national libraries. This numbers around 15,000,000 at launch, of which half a million are digitized objects. This paper covers the technological innovation, cooperation and business development required to launch and run this collaborative pan- European service. It also gives some examples of how research and discovery has benefited from this collaboration.