Digital Libraries of the Future - and the Role of Libraries

Digital libraries of the future will not be anymore only the digital analogous of the physical libraries. They will give access to a large variety of multimedia and multi-type documents created by integrating content from many different heterogeneous sources that range from text, images, audio-video repositories, to scientific data archives, databases, and program repositories. The digital library will provide a seamless environment where the co-operative access, filtering, manipulation, generation, and preservation of these documents will be supported as a continuous cycle. Users of the library will be both consumers and producers of information, either by themselves or in collaborations with other users. Policy ensuring mechanisms will guarantee that the information produced is visible only to those actors that have the appropriate rights to do so. The realisation of this new vision on the one hand requires the provision of a new technology and on the other changes the role played by the libraries in the information access-production cycle. This talk discusses these issues in the light of the recent advances in the digital library technologies which can easily lead to the implementation of the illustrated scenario in a very near future