The Renardus broker service: collaborative frameworks and tools

Renardus was developed under the EU’s User-friendly Information Society programme by partners from national libraries, university research and technology centres and subject information gateways Europe-wide. Since January 2000, those partners have been working towards realisation of their aim to build a single Web-based “broker service” providing cross-search/cross-browse access to existing Internet-accessible scientific and cultural resource collections distributed across Europe. This paper describes Renardus’ key concepts and highlights some of the collaborative frameworks and tools developed and deployed during the project, and the existing technical and information standards used, particularly in support of metadata modelling, mapping and sharing and the information architecture. Issues, implications and benefits for end users and information professionals are presented through illustrations of the interface design. We conclude with an outline of organisational arrangements and strategies, outstanding issues and next steps in encouraging future collaboration with other services.