Global Memory Net: New collaboration, new activities and new potentials

In technological terms, it has been a long time since my PROJECT EMPEROR-I-- a multimedia interactive videodisc project on the First Emperor of China’s famous terracotta warriors and horses in 1984. At that time, PROJECT EMPEROR-I demonstrated that multimedia technology could change the way we seek, demand, and use information. Two decade later, fueled by enormous progress in science and technology, we have come a very long way from the use of interactive multimedia technology in the workstation environment to the global networked environment. We have moved from the use of hardcopy and analog resources to digital content, which users can search, retrieve and use instantly to meet their needs over the global network with no national boundaries. We have also moved from the offering of multimedia content of one specific subject topic to the digital content of all media formats on all related subject topics to the world instantly. We are truly living in a new period of unprecedented opportunities and challenges [1]! So, in this digital era, we have witnessed the exciting convergence of content, technology, and global collaboration in the development of digital libraries [2] with great potential for providing universal information access. Thus, today’s information seekers, regardless whether they are general public, school children, or those from research and higher education communities seek information for education, research, entertainment, or enrichment in very different ways from before. From the information resources point of views, the old model of “owning ” a collection has given way to “sharing, ” and the new emphases have shifted from possessing large “physical libraries ” to “virtual libraries ” digitally distributed all over the world. In the last two decades, I have experienced much of these transformations up-close and personal through my own R&D activities – from the creation of interactive videodisc and multimedia CD i