SEMINAR:
The RUSLANet Project Today and in the Near Future

On November, 14, 1996 in St.Petersburg State Technical university there was held a seminar, organized by the Fundamental Library (FL) and Open Library Systems Center (OLSC). Ninel K. Plemnek, Director of the FL opened

the seminar and addressed the speech of welcome to all participants of the seminar. Alexander I. Plemnek, Director of OLSC.

delivered a report, devoted to the main results of the first stage of RUSLANet project and the perspectives of the future distributed library system development for the north-west region of Russia.

The following reports were presented on the seminar and aroused the great interest of the participants of the seminar:

1. “Problems of workbenches development for documents processing” , presented by Sergey T. Dorofeev, Head of Department of OLSC;
2. “Support of interactive access to OPAC for various types of users”, presented by Roman V. Stogov, student of Technical Cybernetics Department;
3. Development of the interface to relational databases on the base of Z39.50 protocol, presented by Rustam T. Usmanov, student of Technical Cybernetics Department;
4. “The principles of distributed library systems development on the base of the open standards”, presented by Vladimir L. Baranov, post-graduate student;
5. “The practical use of Internet for search of scientific and technical information”,

   

   presented by Elena M. Chervinskaya, Head of FL Department of Scientific and Technical Information.

The WWW-server for RUSLANet project members (http://www.ruslan.ru:8001), the prototypes of workbenches, OPAC and Z39.50-service were demonstrated.

About 60 participants came to the seminar. There were representatives from

• Russian National Library,
• Library of the Academy of Science,
• Russian State Historical Archive,
• National Library of the Republic of Karelia,
• Central State Public Library, named after Vladimir Mayakovsky,
• Universities and academic libraries from St.Petersburg, Moscow, Tver and Petrozavodsk.

Discussion which followed by the presentations, finished by signing the agreement of cooperation within the limits of the RUSLANet project. The participants stated that the work which had been started by the FL and OLSC by their own initiative was very actual and useful for Russian libraries. It was decided to give the prototypes of workbenches free of charge for testing to the participants of RUSLANet project. The libraries of St.Petersburg and the North-West region of Russia were recommended to put information about their libraries on the WWW-server for RUSLANet project to become visible in the Internet information space. The stuff of the FL and OLSC was recommended to arrange the serious of training courses on Internet for librarians of St.Petersburg and north-west region of Russia, to make the resources of FL and OLSC available for the specialists of RUSLANet project members.

The perspectives of the future cooperation of the libraries of the North-West of Russia within the limits of the RUSLANet project were discussed during the seminar.

Lubov N. Agadzanova, Head of FL Department,
Email: libmaster@unilib.neva.ru

webmaster@ruslan.ru