DutchESS: Dutch Electronic Subject Service – a Dutch national collaborative effort

This article gives an overview of the design and organisation of DutchESS, a Dutch information gateway created as a national collaborative effort of the National Library and a number of academic libraries. The combined centralised and distributed model of DutchESS is discussed, as well as its selection policy, its metadata format, classification scheme and retrieval options. Also some options for future collaboration on an international level are explored.