EULER-TAKEUP news

[Michael Jost <jo _at__ zblmath.FIZ-Karlsruhe.DE>]

Hallo,

folgende Mitteilung gibt es leider nur auf Englisch. Das sollte
wohl aber kein Problem sein...


EU funded EULER-TAKEUP project completed successfully.



On Monday last week, 25.11.02, the EULER-TAKEUP project has reached
one of its principal contractual aims: the founding of the "EULER
Consortium" as an independent legal body. This has happened in the form
of an registered association according to German law (pending the
approval of the registration at the association register, and the
official recognition as tax privileged non-profit organization, which
has been applied for).


Technical developments within the project have been very successful:
As reported earlier, a new EULER search engine has been implemented
and tested. Afters some modifications, the the final version is available
at http://www.emis.de/projects/EULER/

The project has ended on 30. November 2002.

Please find below some excerpts from the Executive Summary of the
EULER-TAKEUP report on "Sustainable Service and Business Model".

Feel free to contact me in case you need any further information.


Best regards,
   - Michael Jost
(for the EULER-TAKEUP project)


--
Michael Jost
Fachinformationszentrum  Karlsruhe
  - Zentralblatt MATH
Franklinstr. 11
D-10587 Berlin

jo _at__ zblmath.fiz-karlsruhe.de
Tel (49)(30) 3923000, Fax (49)(30) 3927009

------------------------------------------------------------

EULER-TAKEUP
Report on Sustainable Service and Business Model

Executive Summary


EULER is a European based world class real virtual library for mathematics with up-to-date technological solutions, well accepted by users.

In particular, EULER provides a world reference and delivery service, transparent to the end user and offering full coverage of the mathematics literature world-wide, including bibliographic data, peer reviews and/or abstracts, indexing, classification and search, transparent access to library services, co-operating with commercial information providers (publishers, bookstores).

The EULER services provide a gateway to the electronic catalogues and repositories of participating institutions, while the latter retain complete responsibility and control over the creation and maintenance of their data collections as well as the access provisions pertaining to their offerings.

The EULER Consortium is a registered incorporated society (association), according to German law.

The Consortium consists of full members and associate members. Only not-for-profit institutions can become full or associate members. In addition the Consortium recognizes another category: commercial parties may join as sponsoring members.

Full members consist of the current EULER participants and new members who are prepared to contribute actively to the Consortium.

Associate members participate as information providers only. They provide metadata and regular updates of their data according to Dublin Core based EULER specifications.

Commercial partners (sponsoring members) are participants who contribute their metadata according to Dublin Core based EULER specifications and for which a higher financial contribution is required - they cannot be full members.

The Consortium acts through its members to ensure the continuation of the EULER services. Members are required to provide metadata and regular (at least monthly) updates of their databases according to Dublin Core based EULER specifications. The necessary scripts for the conversion are the responsibility of the member. The Consortium can provide initial and basic technical advice. Co-ordinating tasks as well as technical and administrative tasks will be carried out by the Executive Committee. As
necessary such tasks can be distributed among the full members. A Scientific Supervisory Board consisting of the European Mathematical Society (EMS), their appointed representatives, and other suitably qualified and recognized members is responsible to ensure the scientific quality of the EULER service, and advises the Executive Committee on scientific matters. The European Mathematical Society (EMS) represents the interests of the mathematical community for which the EULER service is made. The
EULER services will remain under control of organizations representing the public interest.

The EULER Consortium will need income to provide the management, administrative and technical service to negotiate and sign contracts with new members and commercial partners. The Consortium determines the estimated income needed to keep the service running, and - if possible - to compensate the not-for-profit information providers.

Information provider expenses consist mainly of efforts to provide conversion tools for the metadata (one-time costs), regular updating of data and end-user support. In principle the provider should carry the financial consequences.

Commercial partners will need comparable investments as other members. However, they will have the added value of PR and marketing means to a target audience. Therefore, they are required to contribute financially. In providing links to paid document delivery (pay-per-view from the sites of publishers, purchase of monographs, photocopy ordering from library members) as well as free document retrieval (e.g. full-text technical reports), the EULER service can be considered an information broker
between the mathematical community and information providers. This fact should make it attractive to producers or vendors of mathematical publications and information to advertise through EULER for a target audience. Besides the normal inclusion of full metadata sets into the EULER databases, also a special targeted advertising programme is available.

Several initiatives are currently globally underway to establish a comprehensive Digital Mathematics Library, consisting of scanned images of the whole corpus of historical works, and genuine electronic publications in mathematics. The European Mathematical Society has expressed its interest in contributing to such a development, co-ordinate European activities, and liaise with other global partners. Several of the original partners of the EULER initiative are involved in these and similar
activities. Concrete examples of initiatives are
a) the ERAM project which builds a collection of scanned material based on the "Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik" (1868-1942), and
b) the EMANI initiative which includes key players from Europe, the US (Cornell), and China (Tsinghua University).
Results so far are promising, e.g. the ERAM database covers now about 150.000 publications, with a big portion linked online to the archive of scanned works (fulltext archive) at SUB Göttingen. It  is already now available in EULER.
Research funding agencies world-wide seem to be interested in these developments, which makes it probable that the idea of a global Digital Mathematics Library will eventually be implemented. (See also the article of the executive director of the American Mathematical Society: John Ewing: Twenty Centuries of Mathematics: Digitizing and Disseminating the Past Mathematical Literature, Notices AMS, Aug 2002, 49(7), 771-777). In such an environment, where several partners would on a global scale
work on such a distributed scanning and preservation project, a powerful end-user discovery tool will be needed that works independently from local specialities and formats, is capable of integrated homogeneous retrieval of heterogeneous distributed sources, and is scalable to cope with the amounts of data that are to be expected. EULER has proven that its model is an optimal choice for such a discovery system. Only few adaptations seem to be necessary.

Currently, EULER is in possession of two different technical options that are ready to run the EULER services:
  - A decentral model, consisting of special Z39.50 servers running at distributed sites, with a central search engine and user interface,
  - A central model independent of Z39.50, which has metadata repositories and user interface at a single place.

Both models are adequate to run the EULER services, however, they have specific advantages and disadvantages. For future developments, it is planned to work on a service model that combines the advantages of both systems while eliminating their drawbacks.