Digital Library Activities in Germany The German Digital Library Program GLOBAL INFO

Several digital library projects have emerged in Germany in recent years. The German Digital Library Programme GLOBAL INFO, which is funded by the federal ministry for education and research from 1998 to 2003, is about to become the most important of them. It 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. A first wave of projects has recently started. 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.