A few personal notes Delighted to be at HKUST (remember NIT ’92 with Mimmin Chang’s staff!) So happy to see so many old friends! It is an honor to celebrate the 10 th Anniversary of HKIUG Would like to thank Dr. Samson Soong and the IUG’s Executives for inviting me Special thanks goes to Dr. Soong’s incredible staff for all the efforts and care. Specifically to Alice Ho for her careful logistical arrangement!

The Global Digital Library - Conceptual Diagram (Presented at the International Conference on National Libraries – Towards the 21st Century, Taipei, April 1993)

Vision: Anyone Anywhere Anytime can have access to information and ANY human knowledge through the use of global information network This is easily said then done! We are a long way to this! Give us great challenge! Where do we begin?

Digital Library’s Conceptual Model Ching-chih Chen, Howard Wactlar, James Z. Wang and Kevin Kiernan, "Digital Imagery for Significant Cultural and Historical Materials - An Emerging Research Field Bridging People, Culture, and Technologies," International Journal on Digital Libraries, 5: (2005).

CHALLENGES FOR DEVELOPING A WORLD DIGITAL LIBRARY (1) Using web as a platform to enable more user participation, and not using Web for publishing, Providing seamlessly integrated multimedia information services to enrich user experience, Providing innovative information services, and not offering packaged software for building databases, User’s need and behavior in information seeking should not be pre- determined, thus the search and retrieval capabilities have to be able to anticipate and accommodate all kinds of needs, User needs to control the use of data, thus he/she can choose to search one single collection or multi-collections,

CHALLENGES FOR DEVELOPING A WORLD DIGITAL LIBRARY (2) Knowledge base and not just database(s), therefore once simple information is found, user can and should be enriched with more related multimedia information, and mixable or re-mixable resources if desired, Provide freely accessible and searchable web resources, and not just link with them, Enhance user experience and ability to consume the obtained information, multilingual capabilities are essential for both presentation as well as retrieval, User should be able to lead from one tiny useful information to play big and link that to the world collections as well as world bibliographic and web resources,

CHALLENGES FOR DEVELOPING A WORLD DIGITAL LIBRARY (3) User should be able to address the content in any granularity, Geographical access to content should be provided, Intellectual property of the content provider should be protected (dynamic digital WM), User should be able to use the discovered and retrieved data to develop his/her own project(s), User should be able to actively contribute to the library – Be a contributor!

Living in a new period of unprecedented opportunities and challenges! Witnessing the exciting convergence of: content, technology global collaboration with great potential for providing universal information access.

Global Memory Net: Fast digital community and content building Growing number of individual digital collec- tions from collaborators UNESCO’s Memory of the World Library of Congress Asia Division’s collections World National Libraries World digital collections – 2400 selected ones Etc…

New Exciting Development: First US World Heritage Digital Center UNESCO ’ s Memory of the World is already on Global Memory Net. Designated Memory site of over 90 countries are involved. October 27, 2006 – Signed Memorandum of Understanding with UNESCO World Heritage Center Link 830 current World Heritage sites of 138 countries together using the Global Memory Net technologies. Create an integrated multimedia, multilingual digital memory of the world. China has 33 such sites – including Forbidden City, The Great Wall, Summer Palace, Temple of Heaven, Qin Terracotta Museum in Xian, etc. Hong Kong and Macau area has one.

And more…

Real-Time Demonstration To illustrate the features of Global Memory Net – how we attempt to meet the challenges outlined above, half of this talk will be devoted to real-time demonstration over the Internet.

Acknowledgment PROJECT EMPEROR-I was supported by National Endowment for the Humanities US National Science Foundation’s International Digital Library Program – NSF/CISE/IIS – NSF/CISE/IIS