Over 5 - 6 December 2005, the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries held a brainstorming meeting in Nice, France. Practitioners including librarians and researchers in the digital libraries field came from within and outside the DELOS Network, from both Europe and the United States, as well of course as representatives of the European Commission. The aim of this gathering was to formulate responses to the i2010 Digital Library questions from the Commission and to discuss the DELOS vision of the future of Digital Libraries.

  
Some of the participants at the Brainstorming meeting

  

Much of the discussion focused on the requirements for the envisioned European Digital Library (EDL) whilst keeping in view the current effort emanating from existing operations such as The European Library (TEL) and the MICHAEL initiative. It was apparent at this meeting that there was a consensus upon the importance of delivering the large-scale digitization of materials and, equally significantly, the effective organisation of the latter into a system which could guarantee unified access across the Continent, a vision which forms a major plank of the i2010 Digital Library initiative.

Horst Forster, Director of Directorate E (Content) of the IST Programme represented much of this feeling in his opening presentation in a series of general views. He spoke on the aims, objectives and composition of the European Digital Library from the standpoint of the European Commission. He highlighted the need for the large-volume digitisation of content to which there needed to be universal online accessibility. The number of collections and items that will be accessible to the public will depend on the digitisation efforts by the Member States and Horst explained that the Commission will help to accelerate and co-ordinate their efforts. Equally importantly however in the view of the DELOS Network was the emphasis that Horst laid upon digital preservation without which the digital information that the EDL will acquire would eventually cease to be accessible to future generations.

In considering the future effort required to bring about the EDL, Horst predicted a substantial increase in funding over the existing 100 million Euros since 2001 for the years to come. He highlighted some of the key research for future developments which included:

• More sophisticated treatment of digitised materials, automated indexing of texts, sound and image
• Improved multilingual search engines
• Services supporting annotation and collaborative working
• Improvements in the process of digitisation
• Provision of systems and services to guarantee the long-term preservation of and access to digital content

When speaking of the next few years to come, Horst said he expected to see full EU-wide collaboration between national libraries quite soon with searchable and usable multi-lingual access to collections becoming available in the next two years. By 2010 he stated that collections ought to have expanded to include archives, museums and other libraries.

In addition to this lead general view, Jill Cousins (Head of Office-The European Library) gave a presentation on The TEL Vision and Yannis Ioannidis (University of Athens) gave a presentation on The DELOS Vision. Steve Griffin of the National Science Foundation (NSF) gave an overview of digital library activities in the US.

During the Brainstorming meeting ERCIM organized a press conference for Frech journalists, where Horst Forster expressed again his view for the future of the European Digital Library. In the same press conference Jerome Chailloux, Director of ERCIM, briefly presented the ERCIM mission, and Vittore Casarosa, DELOS deputy Director, presented the main DELOS activities and the DELOS view for future Digital LIbraries.

  
Jerome Chailloux, Director of ERCIM (left), Horst Forster, Director of IST Directorate on Content (center) and Vittore Casarosa, DELOS deputy Director (standing) present ERCIM, DELOS and the i2010 program to French journalists

  

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Publication date: March 2006
File last modified: Monday, 22-May-2006

The Delos Newsletter is published by the Delos Network of Excellence
and is edited by Richard Waller of UKOLN, University of Bath, UK.

   

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