About – History

1. The collaboration among its members, by establishing common policy, on journals subscriptions (print and electronic), with aid to promote rational growth of journals collections among partners, savings and access to a greater number of electronic sources in order to meet the educational and research needs of the users of the participating institutions.
2. The creation and function of the Catalog of bibliographic records (Union Catalogue) of Hellenic Academic Libraries and the use of the entries in the Catalog of each member of the Consortium.
3. The joint subscription to electronic resources and services, and managed remote access to electronic resources and information services, including electronic journals.
4. Developing and establishing standards for any kind of librarian work.
5. The responsibility for continuing training of its members’ library staff.
6. The collaboration on providing available material to each participating library through interlibrary loan and other methods and practices to ensure and facilitate the material availability among the partners.
7. The cooperation with similar institutions and organizations home and abroad in order to ensure the participation of HEAL-Link on international developments in library cooperation and copyright management.
8. To undertake any other initiative that promotes and develops Hellenic Academic Libraries through joint activities and initiatives.

• HEAL-Link moved to direct contacts, negotiations and final agreements with more than 15 recognized scientific journals and electronic resources publishers. Main criteria for choosing these services were:
  • the ability to provide on-line access to electronic content,
  • abstracts and full-text files of scientific journals in subject areas related to the research and educational needs and directions of HEAL-Link members.
• Obtained appropriate equipment and software for the development of the Union Catalog of Greek Academic Libraries.
• There has been an evaluation of print journal collections (detailed logging, usage charting, matching with the current research and educational interests of each institution , etc.) according to the most widely used method of analysis and assessment of libraries collections (Conspectus WLN/OCLC), while supplying the corresponding software (Conspectus WLN software), in order to estimate the journals collections of Chemistry, Physics and Informatics of the five libraries that participated in the pilot:
  • Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
  • University of Ioannina
  • University of Crete
  • University of Macedonia
  • University of Patras
• The criteria of the selection of journals in these categories were:
  • the common interest of the above institutions on subject categories, as recorded in their research programs and related activities
  • the large number of published journals and subscriptions in these subject categories
  • the great cost of these journals subscriptions
  • the importance of early notification of the academic community on the latest developments in these sciences.
• The results of the pilot evaluation of print journals have shown that print journals collections of the participating libraries were notably incomplete and therefore any effort to cooperate in the development of library collections of print journals would have no significant economic benefit and would contribute little to extended access of the libraries to a greater number of titles.
• Based on the results of the pilot project evaluation collections of print journals, the Consortium turned towards common access to electronic resources of all the libraries of the academic institutions in Greece.
• The Total Quality Management Unit of Greek Academic Libraries has been established in accordance with international standards. This unit resides and works at the University of Ioannina and its main purpose is the analysis, processing and dissemination of statistical information (size, capacity, contribution to research, teaching, research and general scientific events in the country) for the Greek academic libraries.
• The Inter-library system for electronic documentation of modern Greek gray literature ARTEMIS has been created, which is an integrated distributed unit of electronic Documentation. The purpose of ARTEMIS is the systematic archiving and dissemination of intellectual production of AEI and TEI country (diplomatic, postgraduate and doctoral theses, technical reports, teaching notes etc.) with the help of technology of digital libraries.

Hellenic Academic Libraries Link is a non-profit organization. Founding of Hellenic Academic Libraries Link has originally been anticipated and described in the Technical Report of the Horizontal Action Libraries under O.P. education program, which has been funded 75 % by the European Union and 25 % by national resources. Final specifications and the strategy of the founding and organizing were studied and formulated in the Final Report of the Electronic Journals Working Group as a result of the corresponding group’s study and research. The Implementation Team for the Pilot Program undertook the creation of HEAL-Link and the implementation of the findings of the above study in the form of a pilot project.