The discipline of library science has a considerable tradition in Slovene areas: in the 19th century one of the librarians in the Lyceum Library, now the National and University Library, was the talented linguist Matija Čop. In spite of the continual strong influence of German in the 19th and 20th centuries, and today of English technical literature and terminology, Slovene terms have developed, strengthened and become established. But during all thistime, no particular attention was paid to library terms and no organised attempt was made to codify and normalise them. Their use was based primarily on language practice and on the norms of individual "schools" or of important and influential individuals; moreover, they were not formally or semantically standardised. Due to the fact that, at the end of the 20th century, there was still no monolingual, let alone multilingual, dictionary of library terminology, the preparation and publication of both became essential. This gap was filled by a long-term project involving the preparation of an explanatory Slovene dictionary of library science, as well as a multilingual dictionary being produced by an international network of contributors. As there was no existing material to draw upon, both dictionaries had to start almost from scratch, which meant that they began by focusing wholly on coming up with an inventory of terms. The dictionaries are being produced within a computer environment, so that all the contributors have access to working material in electronic format, which is of particular importance when it comesto standardising what is written by the project partners in sixteen different countries. The data model was designed to facilitate an adequate composition and division of dictionary entries, as well as simple and effective use of the dictionaries on disc or online, while at the same time enabling the format required for the preparation of printed versions produced via electronic publishing and printing on demand.
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