European Union endorses ERCIM Digital Document Initiative

by Christos Nikolaou

In a panel discussion held during the ERCIM Meetings at SZTAKI, Budapest, George Metakides, Head of the EC IT programme at DG III commented on points raised in an ERCIM discussion paper that regarded the ERCIM Digital Document Repository Initiative.

The paper stated that ERCIM believes that a major new activity on digital document repositories on a pan-European scale is needed immediately because:

• New technologies, especially the Internet and WWW, are radically changing the roles of content providers and content consumers with respect to multimedia on-line services. In particular, new technologies must be developed to support authors creating scientific and technical documents, to assist the world-wide dissemination of results, and to provide appropriate on-line access facilities. The US is facing this challenge by deploying nationwide, Internet/WWW based digital libraries.
• Industry needs easy access to international scientific and engineering data and literature (including grey literature and news on the very latest developments) for technology watch and the design of new products. The right conditions must be created to favour and stimulate the rapid transfer of results and know-how from the research world to industry so that European corporations can gain the edge in the production of new products and in the provision of new services or the improvement of old ones. Corporate information systems need to be connected in a secure and effective way to the network of document repositories deployed by private as well as by public content-producers.

There is a need for rapid, timely and coherent access by the "information society" to on-line multimedia digital document bases. Expertise to build such systems is required from many branches of the computer and information sciences community. ERCIM can play this role.

ERCIM is now organising a number of preliminary activities with the intention of preparing the ground for a major concerted initiative aimed at building a Pan-European Scientific Digital Documentary Repository. It has set up DELOS, a working group to discuss the most significant research issues funded by IT LTR in this area, reoriented its 95-96 fellowship programme to attract young researchers to work on digital libraries, formulated a proposal for the organisation of a series of European Conferences on digital libraries, established ties with similar projects in the US and with the National Science Foundation and CNRI, and is working closely with the European branch of the WWW Consortium. It has also set up an experimental system for linking the collections of technical reports of the ERCIM member research centres and labs on-line. This last activity is running in close collaboration with NCSTRL, a US Consortium in which all the Computer Science Departments of the major US universities participate. It will soon be possible to access and download technical reports of the major European and US research centres using sophisticated search and retrieval mechanisms.

ERCIM thus recommends that the Commission of the European Union supports an activity analogous to the NSF/ARPA/NASA initiative. The central focus should be the building of coalitions for theme-oriented digital libraries. We claim that this initiative will:

• constitute a leverage to transform research and education and promote synergy and multidisciplinary research
• improve manufacturing competitiveness
• widen access to information resources
• provide more cost effective access to information
• accelerate the development of the libraries of the next century, and improve the rate at which basic scientific knowledge is disseminated
• contribute to creating new standards.

In his response, George Metakides agreed with ERCIM that an initiative of this type could play an extremely important role in providing easy and timely access to world-wide distributed multimedia information bases contributing thus to the advancement of research work, increasing the competitive potential for industrial and in general improving the quality of on-line services. If handled properly it could prove to be an area where Europe can provide international leadership especially in areas such as multilinguality in information systems or interoperability of autonomous federated distributed systems. He recognised that ERCIM could play a leading role in the definition, activation and implementation of such activities at a European level. The initiative was to be viewed with favour by the Commission and he promised that he would investigate which of the Commission's programmes were most appropriate for a joint funding. He invited ERCIM to prepare a suitable proposal and to discuss it with the Commission.

Immediately following the Panel, Metakides was shown a demonstration of the initial work at the experimental servers for the on-line technical reports of the ERCIM member institutions. So far, pilot sites have been set up at nearly half of the ERCIM national labs. Servers are expected to be installed at the other centres in the near future.