Hellenic Libraries Union Catalog (HLUC)

Abstract

Abstract: The Hellenic Library Union Catalog (HLUC) is one of the projects that were developed as a result of the relocation of the National Library of Greece (NLG), as a part of Action 2 "Development of Digital Services" and was fully funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. It is an information system that aims to integrate and highlight all the collections from the Greek libraries in one single catalog. It was designed and implemented by the NTUA Annex of the Hellenic Academic Libraries Link, in collaboration with the National Library of Greece. It essentially organizes an open access collection of high- quality bibliographic data and aims to promote, amongst other things, rare, special and other types of bibliographic material. All Greek libraries are invited to participate.Currently HLUC is in a pilot phase. So far, more than 50 libraries from Greece and Cyprus are participating and the number of participants is increasing. The objective of the pilot phase was to test the operation of the HLUC by controlling the entire workflow starting from the moment that the data is imported to the system, incorporated and presented via the HLUC environment. Also system failures will be identified and corrected and functions as well as the general infrastructure will be improved. During this pilot phase, system reports will be sent to the member libraries aiming to receive their feedback, in order to improve the services provided by the HLUC. The purpose of this paper is to describe all the procedures followed for studying, designing and developing the system and to present how it works.