The EUROCAT project — the integration of European Community multidisciplinary and document‐oriented databases on CDROM. An exercise in merging data from several databases into a single database as well as solving the problem of multi‐lingualism
| Pages | 319-326 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045254 |
| Published date | 01 April 1993 |
| Date | 01 April 1993 |
| Author | Richard Hainebach |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Article
The EUROCAT project —
the integration of European
Community
multidisciplinary and
document-oriented
databases on CDROM
An
exercise
in
merging data
from several databases
into
a
single database
as
well as
solving the problem of
multi-lingualism
Richard Hainebach
EPMS bv — Ellis Publications, PO Box 1059,
6201 BB
Maastricht,
The
Netherlands
Abstract: The Institutions of the European Communities
produce a number of document-oriented databases based
on publications and documents distributed either by the
Office for Official Publications of the European
Communities or by the individual EC institutions
themselves. These databases are known under the names of
ABEL, CATEL,
CELEX,
CORDIS RTD-Publications
(formerly known as EABS),
ECLAS,
EPOQUE,
EURISTOTE, RAPID and SCAD and are available via hosts
such as
EUROBASES,
ECHO and
the
Office for Official
Publications. Until the establishment of the EUROCAT
project,
no single database held a comprehensive and
complete collection of all European Community documents
and publications. This paper describes the approaches and
development procedures taken in integrating and
harmonising the data from the various databases in order to
produce the truly multilingual EUROCAT database using
MS-DOS-based software. The resulting database will be
available on
CDROM.
1.
Introduction
The EUROCAT project was initiated by EPMS bv —Ellis
Publications and Chadwyck-Healey Ltd, and was later joined
by the Office for Official Publications of the European Com-
munities, which provides the source
databases.
(The Office for
Official Publications of the European Communities (2 rue
Mercier,
L-2985
Luxembourg) is the official publisher for the
institutions and other bodies of the European Communities.
Chadwyck-Healey Ltd is an international group of companies
specialising in publishing reference and research publications
for academic, professional and business communities.
CDROMs in the area of official publications include UKOP,
the Catalogue of UK Official Publications and Hansard, both
in partnership with HMSO. Chadwyck-Healey also publishes
European
Access,
a current-awareness bulletin on
the
EC.
Ellis
Publications is the publishing division of EPMS bv — Elec-
tronic Publishing Management and Services. It provides a
complete and interconnected range of European Community
information products and services, including a number of re-
search tools on CDROM, diskette and paper, which are sup-
ported by its document delivery service.) Ellis Publications
and Chadwyck-Healey Ltd, on the other hand, are jointly re-
sponsible for developing, producing and marketing the data-
base worldwide.
EUROCAT
is a
CDROM catalogue of all Community pub-
lications and documents and of selected texts published in the
Official Journal, i.e. all legislation from 1985 and all legisla-
tion still in force published prior to 1985, as well as notices
relating to cases before the Court of Justice of the European
Communities. Community publications for the purposes of
EUROCAT is any publication, be it a monograph or serial,
which has a Community institution or body as its corporate
source,
provided that it is not treated as
a
document. By docu-
ment one means
the
published material resulting from
the
leg-
islative process, i.e. COM finals, EP working documents and
ESC opinions known as CES documents.
Inside these broad limits EUROCAT
sets
out to be as com-
prehensive as possible. Its comprehensiveness will increase
with each successive quarterly CDROM edition, as the pub-
lishers obtain access to wider sources of information.
It has been felt for a numbers of years that existing elec-
tronic and printed Community bibliographic services fall
short of meeting the demand by librarians, documentalists
and other professionals of the book
trade.
Although the exist-
ing databases such as CELEX, SCAD and ECLAS are im-
pressive, each of them by themselves have one or more
lacunae.
EUROCAT has been devised by its three co-publishers in
response to the shortcomings of the existing individual data-
bases.
In the long term it will concentrate mainly, and for the
time being exclusively, upon cataloguing material, which
originates from Community institutions and bodies irrespec-
The Electronic Library, Vol.
11,
No. 4/5, August/October 1993 319
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