The use of multimedia to enhance the accessibility of The use of multimedia to enhance the accessibility of digital library resources digital library resources The multicultural-scope of the services offered by the Miguel de Cervantes The multicultural-scope of the services offered by the Miguel de Cervantes digital library digital library Alejandro Bia Description of the project The Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library of the University of Alicante, Spain (http://cervantesvirtual.com), covers many different cultural and academic subjects. It consists of a variety of types of multimedia materials such as hypertext books, facsimile books, images, audio recordings, and videos. Since the beginning of this digital library two years ago, about 64,000,000 accesses have been made. Currently, the average number of pages served is 21,000 daily. 71% of our users are from Spanish speaking countries (Spain and Latin America), 6% from the rest of Europe, and 23% from the rest of the world. History The project began in late 1998 with a small team of 5 persons performing preliminary trial and error tests to determine the viability of the project and to find the most adequate production methods and tools. After this initial phase, massive digital book production started in March 1999, with about 80 persons working on digitisation and correction of texts and a small team of computer technicians mounting the computer infrastructure, developing automatic tools for efficient production and designing the publication processes and the web site. The library was opened to the Internet public in July 1999 with approximately 800 books. Now it has more that 6000 works in catalogue. An average of 120 university graduates and technicians is currently working in this project as librarians, scanner operators, correctors, mark-up specialists and computer technicians.