March 1999

GLOBAL INFO – The German Digital Library Project. Status and Perspectives

(Abstract)

Rudi Schmiede

Darmstadt University of Technology

Dpt. of Sociology

Residenzschloss

D-64283 Darmstadt

The German Digital Library Programme GLOBAL INFO, which is funded by the federal ministry for education and research from 1998 to 2003, has the aim to advance for the single scientist "optimal access to the world-wide electronic and multimedial information on full texts, literature references, factual databases and software" at every workdesk. The programme requests the close cooperation between all the parties taking part in the processes of provision of information and documents (producers, distributors and consumers, i.e. authors, learned societies, publishing houses, booksellers, libraries, scientific information centers and universities) – in this respect it differs from other digital library programmes which, as a rule, include only some of the actors. This cooperation which has to be interdisciplinary, too, is the precondition for the funding of projects. Furthermore, the projects have to accord to the international state-of-the-art in their area, and they have to move in the pre-competitive field.

This high threshold to funding is the reason why the building of an organizational background and the conceptualizing of development and application projects took some time. In 1998 – supported by several "pre-projects" in universities and publishing houses – an appropriate organizational structure was set up to develop such cooperative and coordinated project frameworks. A first wave of project proposals in the last months has been evaluated by independent national and international experts, part of the projects have been proposed, and just recently positively decided upon, for funding. Their areas of concern are

tools and standards in the production of documents (along the publication chain),
description and retrieval of documents and dealing with their heterogeneity (i.e. metadata and retrieval, distributed systems),
and provision and payment systems for published documents in distributed systems.

Some more projects in other fields (dynamic documents, large distributed systems, administration systems for users and integration of electronic business models and payment systems) have been or will be handed in and evaluated in the course of 1999.

A closer cooperation with other national and international initiatives in this broad area remains to be realized. Especially, the available contents and techniques for a thorough advance of scientific information and knowledge cultures have to be developed further.

In my talk, I will briefly outline the main areas of GLOBAL INFO and sketch out its further development.