Van ekonet tot unicat: 7 jaar Flanders Environmental Library Network (Felnet)

In the Flanders' region too it became apparently necessary to centralise (parts of) the library collections on Environment and to put them at the disposal of the general public. In the first half of the '90-ies, following a private initiative called Ekonet, based on the actual knowledge about electronics, a modest attempt was undertaken to cope with those needs. A Bulletin Board System and an Interface enabled third parties to consult the automatised catalogues of a few libraries on-line via Ekonet. Despite these efforts, interested persons were at loss due to the rather uncontrollable distribution of environmental information. A better solution, although requiring several steps, was the Environmental Library Network (Felnet). This aforementioned team, consisting of several private and public libraries and documentation centers, created a website which contained at first only a few addresses and spheres of interest. In a later stage, a common database-structure encompassing several catalogues of the Felnet-team, was created thanks to the software company HEMMIS. From time to time, the software was improved according to the needs. The professional skills of Felnet did not escape the attention of the originators of the Unicat project. This team was considered as almost a unique network of specialised libraries by all the Belgian scientific (university) libraries to operate as an alternative for the United Catalogue of the Scientific Libraries of Belgium (CCB). In this field, the search protocols Z39.50 and the Open Archives Metadata Harvesting (OAMH) will play an important role.