Specialist Information Service Northern Europe

• Applicant: Dr. Kerstin Helmkamp
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; Modern and Contemporary History ; Prehistory and World Archaeology
• Term: since 2016
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 285655876

With the "FID Nordeuropa" (Specialist Information Service Northern Europe) Kiel University Library has established its role as an information broker to the target audience of investigators in the humanities interested in Northern Europe. Northern Europe is a very homogenous region consisting of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Finland including their minorities. Primarily, the FID Nordeuropa covers the areas of history, prehistory and protohistory, archeology, regional studies, literature and linguistics, politics, and other social sciences. One of the central services of the FID Nordeuropa is the acquisition of scientific literature from and about Northern European countries independent of its form of publication. Where possible, online access to the relevant literature has been set up for the members of the target audience. In order to live up to this claim, the existing search structure of the Virtual Research Library Northern Europe, "vifanord" has been transformed into a search engine with a central search index. The new index contains exclusively data from the relevant parts of the national library catalogs from Northern Europe and will be enhanced with relevant offerings among others with publishing houses offerings. Besides, automation of all processes around the index as well as northern European research data will play a key role in the project.The acquisitions profile as well as the institution of further services will also be developed in close contact with the FID's target audience in the future. Aside from the participation of our subject librarian in numerous symposia, this contact is specially enabled through the close contact to the specialist advisory board to the FID and to the members of “Biblioteksmöte”, which is composed by “Northern Europe-librarians” and research assistants from all institutes in Germany. Aside from the acquisition of printed literature and the provision of access to licensed and free online resources Kiel University Library would like to develop its service offerings for this target audience in the areas of digitization.

• DFG Programme: Acquisition and Provision (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)