This survey of recent European projects (from 1992 on) for distributed library services focuses on those funded by the European Union under its EU Libraries Programme. The library services under consideration include searching, locating, requesting, and delivering materials, with authentication and tariffing as auxiliary functions. The projects are classified by degree of distribution, divided into dedicated client/server systems, distributed library applications, and emerging distributed object-based services. About 16 projects are sketched, and some others are briefly mentioned.

The survey presupposes some knowledge of the field, because it contains many unexplained abbreviations.