IDF Press Release
22 April 2003
The International DOI Foundation (IDF) announces that an informal consortium of three major national libraries -- The British Library (UK), Die Deutsche Bibliothek (Germany) and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Netherlands) -- has joined the International DOI Foundation.
This General Membership results from actions proposed by the IFLA/IPA Steering Group in 2002, which recognised that national libraries are best placed to lead DOI adoption within the library community, in particular given their role in associating bibliographic information to national collections. IFLA's 2003 meeting resolved that it would encourage libraries, and especially national libraries, to join the IDF. Parallel to this the Conference of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL) decided at its annual meeting in Edinburgh (2002) to explore the possibilities of national libraries joining the IDF as a consortium. Following a consultation procedure between IDF and six national libraries present at an informal meeting in Frankfurt, October last year, the BL, DDB and the KB are joining the IDF, in anticipation of a proposal for membership being considered by the Conference of European National Librarians. The CENL Board of Directors will decide on formal IDF membership of CENL at its meeting in Vilnius in September.
Through this relationship, a selection of DOI information that is directly relevant for national libraries will be made available via the consortium to the wider CENL and CDNL community.
Dr. Wim van Drimmelen, Director General of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek which will be the co-ordinator of the consortium, said "I am looking forward to our co-operation, which I hope will be to the benefit of libraries as well as publishers."
Dr. Norman Paskin, Director of the International DOI Foundation, said: "We are delighted to welcome this group of leading libraries, and to have their support for our work on a persistent and extensible identification and metadata infrastructure for intellectual property. Our recent work with DOI applications and services will be of particular interest to the library community."
Press contacts:
Norman Paskin International DOI Foundation: n.paskin@doi.org
Johan Steenbakkers, Koninklijke Bibliotheek: johan.steenbakkers@kb.nl
Updated 16 December 2003
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