If the Mediterreanean countries are to find their place in the global
competition, it is essential that their scientific and industrial communities
can have immediate access to up-to-date international scientific, engineering
and other technical information, including news on the very latest developments.
The right conditions must be created to favour and stimulate the rapid transfer
of results and knowhow from the research world to industry so that it can
gain the edge in the production of new products and the provision of new
kinds of services, and already existing products can benefit as quickly
as possible from new advances. It is thus critical for Mediterranean competitiveness
that relevant technical information is made rapidly available to the widely
distributed development and production community.
The recent development of the network infrastructures (information infrastructures/information
highways) is making available (i) thousands of information repositories,
(ii) wide bandwidth data networks and information appliances, and (c) advanced
communications and information access services. It is thus making feasible
the development of large on-line interactive multimedia applications which
require coherent access to large distributed, organized repositories of
information and knowledge. Digital libraries provide the critical information
management technology for the information infrastructure, and at the same
time represent its primary information and knowledge repositories. In other
words, digital libraries are the core of the information infrastructures.
Digital libraries technologies include:
(a) information appliances and services that can provide access and services
in a scalable, efficient, and interoperable way;
(b) information access techniques that can enable efficient searches of
large distributed information repositories, making the myriad of information
resources understandable;
(c) multimedia information technologies that can, for example, synchronize
and integrate real-time delivery of voice and video, and can support content-based
search and retrieval.
In addition, digital libraries technologies must provide for dependability,
manageability, ease of use, interoperability, security, and privacy.
Given the crucial role of digital libraries technologies in the exploitation
of the information infrastructures and in order to be able to develop large
digital library applications efficiently and in a cost effective manner,
a research programme should:
- foster and support a long term research programme that addresses the many
technical problems of the field which still remain open;
- fund a number of pilot projects to develop the appropriate technologies.
An understanding of digital library issues requires operational experience
which can only be gained by large-scale deployment of digital library systems.
Speculation about the digital library in the abstract is of very limited
value.
ERCIM aims at contributing to these actions.
ERCIM has undertaken several initiatives which aim at promoting research
and technology development in the digital libraries field in Europe. In
this talk the ERCIM initiatives in the Digital Libraries area will be illustrated
and possible scenarios for collaboration with the non European countries
will be drawn.