EMANI, ERAM and Other European Activities Contributing to a Global Digital Library in Mathematics.

With the rapidly growing activities in electronic publishing ideas came up to install global repositories which deal with three mainstreams in this enterprise: storing the electronic material currently available, pursuing projects to solve the archiving problem for this material with the ambition to preserve the content in readable form for future generations, and to capture the printed literature in digital versions providing good access and search facilities for the readers. Long-term availability of published research articles in mathematics and easy access to them is a strong need for researchers working with mathematics. Hence in this domain some pioneering projects have been established addressing the above mentioned problems. The talk will describe some of these activities and the plan to develop a global Digital Library in Mathematics (DLM). For example, in the archiving area as a special project for mathematics the Electronic Mathematics Archives Network Initiative (EMANI) had been designed. Having in mind that a distributed architecture would be more suitable and reduce the load on the partners for such a project, a network is proposed, which also might be a more open approach for extending the project from a initially restricted solution to a more comprehensive enterprise. For the core of the network, a co-operational system of reference libraries and content providers like publishers and editors has been be set up. On the side of the libraries the following partners have agreed to set up a prototype for the archive: the Tsinghua University Library in Beijing, the Cornell University Library in Ithaca (N.Y.), the Mathematical Library at Orsay in Paris and the Lower Saxony State and University Library in Goettingen. The first group of content providers consists of the Springer publishing house, associated publishers and journals posted in the Electronic Library of EMIS. The Electronic Research Archive in Mathematics (ERAM) is a German project dealing with capturing the content of a classical bibliographic service in mathematics in a database, and combining this with the retro-digitisation of selected mathematical publications. This is extended now by further projects which shall try to retro-digitise the national mathematical heritage in several countries worldwide. In particular ideas to cover the Russian publications in a digital repository called RusDLM are investigated at present, and they may contribute to a bigger programme for the Russian Federation, called "Electronic