Report on the ELINOR electronic library pilot

Abstract

The ELINOR (Electronic Library Information Online Retrieval) electronic library project, jointly founded by De Montfort University, the British Library and IBM UK, is a research project started in March 1992 [1, 4]. One of the important objectives of the project is to build an electronic (or digital, or virtual) library system containing a large collection of the full contents of high use materials including books, journals, course materials, and multimedia learning packages, which can be directly accessed by students and staff via Windows-based PCs and workstations.

A pilot system was implemented in 1993 to experiment with the various aspects of the electronic library. The project has focused on several research areas, including copyright management, the user aspect and the modelling aspect of the electronic library. A copyright management system, including usage statistics collection and management and printing control, was implemented in-house [19]. An initial user study based on the pilot was conducted on a small sample of students [18]. The pilot system is now being extended both in terms of the subject coverage and network access. This paper covers the user aspect, the system architecture and copyright management of the ELINOR electronic library.