books2u!

Interlibrary loan of books is one of the central services of national, University and research libraries throughout Europe. Some millions of printed documents are shipped every year from one library to another. Nevertheless interlibrary loan of books is a time-consuming, ineffective and expensive activity: The book has to be shipped from the lending library to the borrowing library and back again – just to satisfy the request of a single user. In contrast to that the books2u! project has set up a new service where the time and money which is nowadays used for shipping will be invested into the scanning and digitally reformatting of the requested book. Thus the user will be able to view the page images on a web site. After the digital conversion the book itself will remain secure in its shelve and every European citizen will have access to the page images.