WRITTEN QUESTION No. 327/99 by Alexander FALCONER Costs of EU information services
Date: 1999-02-23
Institutions: European Parliament, FALCONER
Subjects: European Union, dissemination of information, draft budget, information network, information policy, library, operating cost, project management

21.12.1999

EN

Official Journal of the European Communities

C 370/29

(1999/C 370/037)

WRITTEN QUESTION E-0327/99

by Alexander Falconer (PSE) to the Commission

(23 February 1999)

Subject: Costs of EU information services

What are the annual costs and total costs since they started, including staff time, research, development,
programming, hardware (distributors’ and users’), promotion, training, travel and overheads for each of the
following information projects: Eurolib, BREL, CASE, ECHO and Euronet? What are the costs of each to
the European Union?

Answer given by Mr Oreja on behalf of the Commission

(7 May 1999)

Eurolib is the grouping of European institutional libraries, created on the initiative of the Parliament’s
Secretary general
in 1988. Participation in its meetings and the group’s work has never been costed
through specific budget allocations or expenditure, since these are subsumed in the general running costs
of the participating institutions. The Commission and the other institutions consider that, particularly at a
time of rapid change in the library world, the current twice-yearly contacts between professional colleagues
bring important added value to their work, for example, through the launching of Eurolib pages on the
inter-institutional world wide web site Europa. To seek to separate out in a meaningful way the specific
Eurolib component in the work of the staff of 18 libraries,
including that of the Parliament, which
provided the secretariat of Eurolib from 1988 to 1994, is virtually impossible.

BREL (Bibliothèque de recherches européennes de Luxembourg)
Parliament and the Luxembourg national library.

is under the responsibility of

the

ECHO (Electronic case handling in offices) is a RACE project and Euronett (Evaluating user responses on
new European transport technologies) was a DRIVE 1 project, which ran from 1980 until 1984. A detailed
breakdown of expenditure for each project is sent to the Honourable Member and to Parliament’s
Secretariat.

The Commission does not recognise the acronym CASE as identifying any European information project.

(1999/C 370/038)

WRITTEN QUESTION E-0328/99

by Alexander Falconer (PSE) to the Commission

(23 February 1999)

Subject: Costs of EU information services

What are the annual costs and total costs to the European Union, since they started, including staff time,
research, development, programming, hardware (distributors’ and users’), promotion, training, travel and
overheads of other Union list-related information projects: CCN, ISBN, ISSN, JANET and Salbin, identifying
individual projects funded?

Answer given by Mr Oreja on behalf of the Commission

(7 May 1999)

The Commission does not recognise any of the acronyms cited by the Honourable Member as identifying
European information projects.

ISBN and ISSN would appear to be Unesco competences, and JANET and Salbin would appear to be
networks based in the United Kingdom.