It was agreed since the beginning that the discussion of the group would focus on “technology-oriented” issues, leaving out fundamental points of more political and organizational nature (notably digitization and definition of contents, IPR issues), that need to be solved in order for a European Digital Library (EDL) to actually happen. The general consensus was that from the point of view of the technology, the development of a prototype of EDL could start immediately, or as soon as the organizational and political issues have been solved. The main points discussed and the recommendations formulated by the participants were summarized in a presentation during the final plenary session (see presentation).

The participants agreed that the technology issues related to EDL are actually the same issues pertaining to a “Digital Library” in general. Therefore the discussion started trying to reach an agreement about the meaning of the words “digital library”, and a possible definition of such a notion. Following some of the concepts developed in the “DELOS Reference Model for Digital Libraries”, it was agreed that behind those words there are at least three concepts, more or less related to the role that a user of a digital library has with respect to the DL itself:
     · the “end user”, who sees the digital library as a combination of contents and
       services (functions and tools) available to interact with that contents;
     · the “digital library developer” (DL Application developer), who is an Information
       Technology specialist developing tools and services for digital libraries;
     · the “librarian”, who actually has three distinct roles:
       - the “end user librarian”, who manages and interacts with the end users, providing
          assistance and guidance in accessing the library content;
       - the “digital librarian” (DL designer), who defines the logical view of the digital
          library, i.e. defines the actual contents (that can be distributed over different
          repositories) and its structure, and defines the services to be made available to
          the end users (possibly differentiated according to the groups to which they
          belong);
       - the “system librarian” (DL System administrator), who generates an instance of a
          “Digital Library Management System” (DLMS) by using the tools and the
          components available from a DLMS Factory, and populates that instance with the
          contents and services defined by the digital librarian.

According to the concepts described above, the participants agreed on the following general definitions of Digital Library.
     · A DL is the combination of content and  services (abstract view)
     · A DL is the combination of content and (external) services (end user view)
     · An instance of a DL is the combination of distributed content and distributed
       services (DL designer and  administrator view)
     · A DL is an entity providing the functionality to mediate between information objects
       and information users in the context of distributed collections of information
       objects. This (external) functionality includes access, publish, delivery, preservation,
       personalization, etc...(combination of the two preceding views)
     · A DL factory is the set of (internal) services and tools (i.e. software) that allow the
       instantiation of a DL (DL developer view)

The next topic addressed was a possible architecture of the EDL. The conceptual framework for an instance of a digital library is very simple, as it has the users on one side, the content on the other, and a Digital Library Management System in between. Of course in reality the architecture is much more complicated, in order to provide all the functions needed to manage, index and search distributed repositories (possibly in different languages) but basically all the functions can be related to one of the three “layers” mentioned above. The participants in the workshop agreed on a set of general principles for the architecture and the set of services that should be provided by the EDL, as follows.

  

Architecture
     · The EDL should be a loosely coupled “federation” of many different DLs
     · The P2P Service Oriented architecture seems to be the most suitable one
     · The EDL should recommend (enforce)  “standards” for participating in
       the federation
     · The EDL should have a central index (to provide better services), while
       allowing also distributed indexes
     · The EDL should make its (external) services available also as web services

  

Services
     · Combined text and audio-visual search functionality (to be integrated also
       with data streams)
     · Personalized browsing and searching
     · Information visualization and relevance feedback tools
     · Processing of retrieved information
     · Annotation and tools for collaboration
     · Simple configuration and adaptation tools (reliable and scalable)

Finally the participants discussed at length what should be the specific points to be considered in the establishment of the EDL, taking into account the fact that the European Commission is looking at the present TEL system (The European Library), implemented by CENL, as the starting point for EDL, and therefore the discussion focused on those aspects presently missing in TEL, but which should be available in the EDL with a high priority.

     · EDL should provide value add over Google
     · Provide multilinguality
­       - Query in one selected language, results in all selected languages
­       - Translation service
     · Provide a European combined thesaurus / authority
     · Capitalize on the availability of structured metadata
­       - Better organization of content
­       - Support and use of semantic tags
­       - Make use of (European) “value indicators” in ranking
     · Support fee-based access to information and services
     · Support collection navigation within EDL and creation of “virtual collections”
     · Support annotation and collaboration tools
     · Support establishment of a “service registry” (under discussion)
     · Be a vehicle for the elimination of digital divide (e.g. provide text readers in
       less used languages)
     · Ensure EDL is accessible from any search engine (e.g. Google, Yahoo, etc.)

  

The conclusions and the issues debated during this ELAG workshop match well with the issues and recommendations that came out of the Brainstorming meeting organized by DELOS in December 2005, to discuss the questions posed by the Commission about the establishment of a European Digital Library. The participants in that workshop represented a broad range of academic and research institutions, libraries and government organizations. The outcome of the workshop was submitted as an aswer to the online consultation and published as a DELOS report, available here.