Theo van Veen explains that the new infrastructure for the European Library services infrastructure started about two years ago. Web users have become accustomed to Google, Del.icio.us and Flcikr type of application for quite some time already. That means that libraries have to lower their barriers as well to encourage the users to use the library systems.
Library systems have to perceive, interpret and respond to user requests. He illustrates these new services on a demo machine where he translates the abstracts of a record as an option from a menu that appears onmouse over. Het actually lists about 15 different type of services hat re available in this way. An option to is follow on service which triggers a speech service that reads out the translated abstract. All responses can generate new requests. His demonstrator is full of nice little tricks.
The user can make service descriptions themselves, but the systems should learn from the user interactions with the system. It will add some intelligence to the portal.
At the end he comes the legal issues. TEL can’t be held responsible for what users are doing, so they try to work with trusted partners.
The portal is in in a test phase available at http://dev.theeuropeanlibrary.org/vga/SRUportal/
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