8. Conclusions

The European countries have accumulated enormous quantity of information of all kinds. Not only cultural heritage obtained in libraries, archives and museums but also a huge amount of scientific data as well as the materials of the entertainment industry (TV, music, movies, etc.). The large proportion of this material is still not accessible because it is on paper.

The recent advantage in digital storage and digitization technology is making the archiving the digital collections even more feasible and cost effective. On the other hand nearly 90% of the published information are created, stored and may be retrieved in digital form, but only a very little of this information is available via digital libraries.

According to a recent report by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian at the University of California Berkeley, the world produces between one and two exabytes (a billion billion 8-bit bytes) of information each year. Most of this information is in the form of images, sound and numeric data. Printed content represents only 0.003 percent of all content published annually in the world. For every sentence published in print there are 30,000 sentences published on computers.

This is why more concern should be paid to the research and development of the digital libraries. If we speak about information society, the digital libraries should become an integral part of it. They should make Europe´s cultural and scientific content available to all citizens and preserve it for future generations. Our vision of the future digital library is following:

Digital Libraries should enable any citizen to access all human knowledge any time and anywhere, in a friendly, efficient and effective way by overcoming barriers of distance, language and culture and by using multiple internet-connected devices

The framework for future digital library research should be based on a very broad view of digital libraries that takes full advantage of the possibilities offered by the integration of computer and telecommunication technology and content on a global scale.

Defining the Term Digital Library

There are many approaches and definitions to the term digital library. Some are based on a relatively narrow definition -- based explicitly on the properties of the traditional print library. Our approach for the future digital library research is the broad definition of the digital library.

Digital library has the following characteristics:

• digital library is not one entity, the linkages between digital libraries and information services are transparent to the end users;

• for digital libary is not the key point the digitization of the physical material but the organisation of the electronic resource in order to get better access,

• digital libraries are organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works,

•  information resources of the digital library are heterogenous, dynamic and multimedia,

•  the goal of the digital library is universal access in three dimensions; people, location and devices,

• the realisation of the digital library requires the thechnologies for interconnection of different information components, so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities.

Digitization programme and the new project The Virtual Library of Slovakia (VLS) will be the two priorities for the next digital library research in Slovakia. The Project is managed by the Slovak National Library in association with the University of Žilina. The National Library attempts for an integrated approach towards digitization in cooperation with museums, archives and galleries.

The objective of the research is to develop digital libraries with advanced services providing high-bandwidth access to distributed and interactive repositories of history, culture and science generating new forms of cultural and learning experience.

The research requires meaningful cooperation and should concentrate on the following areas:

• digital libraries must integrate access to materials with access to tools that enable to process and present these materials in a way to fulfill the user´s requirements,

• digital library should support individual and community information spaces through a process of selection, annotation, contribution and collaboration,

• digital libraries need semantic structure and new methods of organisation and navigation that enable effective searching and crosssearching among digital libraries,

• research in user interface should support different kind of users of digital libraries,

• there is need to develop new software for creating digital libraries that go beyond the functions of the traditional libraries, but support also new ways of intellectual work and creating of community information spaces, the current free available sofware supports only the functions of traditional library.

• there is need to solve legal and organizational issues of information access,

• the growth of the globally networked information system creates a challenge of semantic interoperability, it is necessary to design and develop metadata framework,

• the digital libraries need business model for creating the income necessary for its operation.

The objective of the research is to develop digital libraries with advanced services providing high-bandwidth access to distributed and interactive repositories of European history, culture and science and generate new forms of cultural and learning experience.