Using Digital Libraries as a Community Hall for Worldwide Information Spiral Development Minoru Ashizawa, Hideaki Kikuchi, Yusuke Mishina, Hiromichi Fujisawa, Minoru Hidaka, Naoko Yamazaki, and Akito Sakurai Central Research Laboratory, Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo, Japan 185-8601 SUMMARY Our concept of a digital library from a users view- point is explained by using a three-layer model of informa- tion distribution: information provider, information broker, and information user. Our worldwide communication-hall prototype consists of the virtual personal library client, called Webshelf, an information publishing server, and a hypermedia archive server, Webarchive. It allows users to virtually personalize information on the Web, organize it, create new information, and publish this new information. Webarchive offers an effective solution to the information volatility problem by storing all of the information obtained by users and managing link consistency. © 1999 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 30(1): 112, 1999 Key words: Digital library; WWW; annotation; in- formation volatility problem; link-consistency manage- ment; user interface; metaphor. 1. Introduction A digital library is an important element of cyber- space. Conventionally a digital library is thought of as composed of (1) computer networks, (2) a catalog database, and (3) a multimedia database. Combining (1) and (2), Hitachi has developed the Library Information Integrated System which helps librarians and users to manage budgets, inventory books in stacks, purchase books, and search, loan, and return books [1]. And combining (1) and (3), the Hitachi Central Research Laboratory is developing a mul- timedia digital-library prototype [2, 3] connected to the World Wide Web. The Latin word cornucopia means horn of plenty and is associated with the prototype through its meaning, abundance of knowledge. This prototype uses the Hitachi Integrated Document Information System for managing multimedia documents by multiview classifica- tion and full-text search [4]. The system also uses the virtual personal library [5] which supports the information activi- ties of users, namely, searching, retrieving, browsing, an- notating, editing, storing, circulating, and so on. In this paper, we describe the prototype of a worldwide commu- nity hall, which is based on the multimedia digital-library prototype. In the worldwide community hall, the virtual personal library is regarded as another important compo- nent in addition to components (1) to (3) mentioned above. In sections 2 and 3 we describe our design concept of the worldwide community hall. According to our concept, the digital libraries serve as a multimedia database through the World Wide Web. Users of the service not only search, retrieve, and browse information stored in digital library databases and public World Wide Web servers but also, by using the virtual personal library, annotate to, add their own ideas to, rearrange, and store the obtained information. And users also add to the digital library databases or send to another user the annotation and rearrangement. The other users who receive it rearrange and add their own ideas to it. The repetition of this process circulates information and develops it among users spirally. Digital libraries store CCC0882-1666/99/010001-12 © 1999 Scripta Technica Systems and Computers in Japan, Vol. 30, No. 1, 1999 Translated from Denshi Joho Tsushin Gakkai Ronbunshi, Vol. J81-D-II, No. 5, May 1998, pp. 10141024 1