Facing future users – the challenge of transforming a traditional online database into a Web service

Library users in the twenty‐first century will be a generation grown up with mobile phones, Internet connections and a hectic lifestyle. This generation calls for immediate actions and solutions; they have no time to wait or waste. Discusses the changing process of a large traditional bibliographic database (containing more than thre million references) moving into a Web service. As a part of the conversion process in progress the database format is under evaluation. In this connection major metadata formats such as Dublin Core, STAS, GILS and TEI have been compared and reviewed in order to achieve the objective of simplifying the record and transforming the database into a Web‐based scientific culture for search and retrieval of information.