DELOS

Description:

DELOS is a Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries partially funded by the European Commission in the frame of the Information Society Technologies Programme (IST). The main objectives of DELOS are research, whose results are in the public domain, and technology transfer, through cooperation agreements with interested parties.

That all citizens, anywhere, anytime, should have access to Internet-connected digital devices to search all of human knowledge, regardless of barriers of time, place, culture or language has been a vision of DELOS since its inception. DELOS believes that, in the near future, networked virtual libraries will enable anyone from their home, school or office to access the knowledge contained in the digital collections created by traditional libraries, museums, archives, universities, governmental agencies, specialised organizations, and individuals around the world. These new libraries will offer digital versions of traditional library, museum and archive holdings including text, documents, video, sound and images. But they will also provide powerful new technological capabilities that enable users to refine their requests, analyse the results, access collections in other languages, share resources, and work collaboratively. 

To that end, DELOS is conducting a joint program of activities aimed at integrating and coordinating the ongoing research efforts of the major European teams working in Digital Library-related areas. Its main objective and goal is to develop the next generation of Digital Library technologies, based on sound comprehensive theories and frameworks for the life-cycle of Digital Library information. 

DELOS is currently working on the development of a Digital Library Reference Model that is designed to meet the needs of the next-generation systems, and on a globally integrated prototype implementation of a Digital Library Management System, called DelosDLMS, which will serve as a concrete partial implementation of the reference model and will encompass many software components developed by DELOS partners. They are two major steps in the direction of the DELOS vision.