ping up-to-date with current
activities. An ad hoc meeting was held in The Hague, Netherlands, on March 27,
1995, at which representatives of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, British Library
and Helsinki University Library met to discuss the proposed CENL WWW. Objectives
were set out at the meeting and an action schedule agreed. These three libraries
set up the pilot Gabriel project. Three other national libraries agreed to
participate in the pilot project: Die Deutsche Bibliothek (Germany), the
Bibliotheque Nationale de France and the Biblioteka Narodowa (Poland). Working
together, these libraries created a functional pilot service based on entries
describing their own services and collections between March and September 1995.
The pilot service was endorsed by the CENL annual meeting at Bern in Switzerland
in September 1995 and launched on the Internet. The service was then mounted and
maintained in London by British Library Network Services and was mirrored in The
Hague, Netherlands, and Helsinki, Finland.

A second stage in the project was initiated on behalf of CENL in October 1995.
The project was hosted by the British Library in London. In November 1995,
national libraries that had not participated in the Gabriel pilot project were
invited to submit their entries. Using the pilot as a basis, this development
project aimed to achieve comprehensive coverage of European national libraries
within Gabriel. During the life of the project, the numbers of CENL member
libraries with their own WWW servers had increased quite rapidly. Every
participating library assigned staff members to act as contact persons for
Gabriel. This project ended in September 1996. As content and publicity built
up, and the numbers of linking sites expanded, measurable usage of the Gabriel
service had increased rapidly.

During the CENL meeting in September 1996 in Lisbon, the CENL members decided
that Gabriel should be launched as an official service of CENL on behalf of
Europe's national libraries on January 1, 1997. The editorial maintenance of
Gabriel was taken over by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of
the Netherlands. The site is now mirrored from the websites of five national
libraries in The Hague (The Netherlands), London (United Kingdom), Helsinki
(Finland), Frankfort (Germany), and Ljubljana (Slovenia).

Updated in December 11, 1998, the introduction of Internet and the Library
Sphere: Further progress for European Librari