Electronic Library "Czech Parliament"

The project of an electronic library is also a significant step towards computerization of services of the Parliamentary Library. This library shall contain complete texts of parliamentary prints (i.e. bills, including explanations and decisions), shorthand minutes (i.e. verbatim minutes of all sessions and all voting) and other parliamentary documents from 1861 until now in an electronic form. It would contain tens of thousands of pages of text which could create a good library with hundreds of volumes. The Library has already taken some preliminary steps in close cooperation with the Department of Information Technology of the Committee of the House of Parliament. On the basis of a proposal by a private firm ESU Praha in June 1995, the library and the Department of Information Technology submitted a proposal for an electronic library called "Czech Parliament" to the Secretary General of the Office of the House of Parliament. The Sekretary general of the Office approved the project and appointed a committee of executive officers from the Office under his leadership for final consideration of the proposal before a selection procedure is announced. The committee was to consider the usefulness of the project, set forth its content and scope and try to find some means in the budget for 1996 to start the project (the budget of the Office for 1996 was already set forth at the time of approval of the project). The committee decided to separate conversion of parliamentary texts into an electronic form from production and distribution of a CD-ROM which the project counted on as a carrier of data, and to hold a selection procedure only for the conversion. At the end of 1995, a survey of prices on the market was conducted which helped us calculate the