From focusing on e-book hardware, the e-book service now concentrates on content. You can read more about that in a follow-up project: Project Downlaan of e-books, www.downlaan.dk (in Danish, abstract in English). In this project, Copenhagen, Århus and Randers have offered 1,200 of their borrowers the possibility of downloading e-books on IT and comparative literary history, mainly using Adobes pdf, but also experimenting with the xml-format.

Apart from the three libraries, also the Danish National Library for the Blind, Danish Library Centre A/S and DBC Media participate in the project with Gyldendal, the publishers, as observers. The project has received funding from the Danish National Library Authority.

Tanja Hesselager Olesen
Danish National Library Authority
tho@bs.dk

844 users of Interlibrary Loan Requests
Since October 2000 Danish citizens have been able to use library.dk for searching the national union catalogue. They can also send requests to their local library for any book, cd etc. belonging to a Danish library.With funding from the Development Pool, two big public libraries and two university libraries in Copenhagen have conducted a questionnaire to 844 users who collected a book or other material loaned from another library. Most of these users are students and about 70% said that they used library.dk to request the materials. About 20% said that they sometimes send a request to their public library and to their institution library for the same title. The report recommended further investigations into any easy access for the user to information about status of the requested materials.

Leif Andresen
Danish National Library Authority
lea@bs.dk