Interactive Multimedia On-line Services: The Digital Library Paradigm 

Costantino Thanos
CNR-IEI
Via S. Maria 46, I-56126 Pisa, Italy
email: thanos@iei.pi.cnr.it

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.