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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.

Renardus was developed under the EU’s User‐friendly Information Society programme by partners from national libraries, university research and technology centres and subject information gateways Europe‐wide. Since January 2000, those partners have been working towards realisation of their aim to build a single Web‐based “broker service” providing cross‐search/cross‐browse access to existing Internet‐accessible scientific and cultural resource collections distributed across Europe. This paper describes Renardus’ key concepts and highlights some of the collaborative frameworks and tools developed and deployed during the project, and the existing technical and information standards used, particularly in support of metadata modelling, mapping and sharing and the information architecture. Issues, implications and benefits for end users and information professionals are presented through illustrations of the interface design. We conclude with an outline of organisational arrangements and strategies, outstanding issues and next steps in encouraging future collaboration with other services.

The MODELS (MOving to Distributed Environments for Library Services) project is based around a series of five workshops. The third of these, “Organising access to printed scholarly material”, proposed a co‐ordinated approach to providing access to a managed, distributed bibliographic resource. This article has two main ambitions: firstly it explores the influential outcomes of the third workshop, and secondly, it places this discussion in the wider MODELS context.