Math-Bib-Net

Next to departments of mathematics, university libraries are the main local provider of mathematical documents in both printed and electronic form. In order to provide the user with the most uniform access to literature in mathematics possible, a collaboration between mathematical institutions on the one hand and university libraries on the other seemed desirable. The Math-Bib-Net was a DFG-sponsored project that was designed to initiate cooperation between these two groups of institutions. The cooperation concentrated on the following points:

• an offering of mathematically relevant Internet resources, as determined by the libraries and departments together. This entailed a unified structure at the respective institutions' servers for the information offered.
• expansion of the material offered by establishing a central collection point for foreign Internet documents,
• realization of unified common search possibilities for the holdings of all the institutions,
• realization of profile services, i. e., the patron can be automatically informed of new material appearing in his areas of interest,
• realization of archiving and cataloging components for the relevant Internet documents present in the departments.

In terms of the content, he project is in close contact with the DFG-sponsored project called „Information Services for Mathematics in the Internet“ (MathNet). This latter project was an initiative of the nine departments of mathematics. The main goals of this project were:

• The departments were each to introduce a second, standardized home-page (the Math-Net page). This includes links to the department's most commonly visited WWW pages.
• The documents that are available in the departments were to be described by a common meta-data set. The Math-Net uses the Dublin Core meta-data record. The use of common meta-data makes for a high quality search using specialized search engines.
• The experience gained and structures developed in the Math-Net Project are to be incorporated and built up in the Math-Bib-Net Project.