PROJECT N° 4

BIBLIOTHECA UNIVERSALIS

- Progress Report - april 1996 -

1. Objectives

The objective of the project is to constitute from existing programmes the large, distributed virtual collection of humankind knowledge, made available to a large public via networks, and to advance international cooperation towards the establishment of global electronic library systems.

The project should strengthen the function of libraries and improve availability at international levels of digitized resources including both bibliographic records and information content itself (integrating text, graphics, still images, sound and video information). It will promote the large-scale digitization of materials on electronic library systems. Furthermore, it should demonstrate how integrated digitization techniques support long-term preservation as well as enable immediate, easy access to such documents, including the linguistic dimension.

2. Actions undertaken in 1996

- Meeting in Paris on May 29th.

- Publication of minutes with the following conclusions :

1. Bibliotheca universalis will be open to participation by other countries.

2. Creation of a Web server to promote Bibliotheca universalis. The French Ministry of Culture will manage the server and create links with the WWW servers of the participants to provide information on the G7 project itself and on the current status of the project undergoing in different countries.

3. Adoption of the principle of a common database to identify digitized documents, created from existing catalogs, to ensure that the same document is not digitized more than once.

4. Creation of a permanent French - Japanese secretariat in charge of planning and working groups management on specific topics such as digitized collections definitions, technical (multilingual search engines...) and copyright issues.

3. Actions to be launched in 1996

1/ The Secretariat proposes to focus the G7 project on international cooperation and exchange of information in order to tighten G7 objectives with the present development of national digital programs.

2/ Following the May meeting, thematic working groups will be organize. The possible activities of the groups could be on collections, copyright issues and technology (retrieval methods, dataformat and databases structures...)

3/ A report will be published after an international detailed survey of national digital programs managed by the partners.

4/ A demonstrator giving access through bibliographical records to samples of digitized documents (texts, images, sounds) held by the different libraries will be shown in Midrand in South Africa during the ISAD Conference (May 13-15th).

5/ The further implementation plan will be discussed in the next meeting scheduled for 1996 in Tokyo (to be discussed between the partners).