Creating digital libraries together—collaboration, multimodality, and plurality

Many have tried to answer the question of what a digital library is and how such libraries should be built. But, in a sense the question of how to construct digital libraries as well defined entities is misguided from the beginning. There are many approaches to building digital libraries [7, 18, 4] and each approach must be understood from within a context. Some contexts such as information retrieval and digitizing of existing materials have received much attention [12, 22, 18, 17], while other contexts have been more or less ignored [19]. One such context is that of networking from a higher level of abstraction [8, 11]. Since traditional libraries have long since existed in elaborate and large-scale physical networks it is only natural that we should see such structures mirrored in the world of digital abstract networks. The Universal Simulator [10] application builds on the idea that research in digital libraries need not necessarily focus on micro level infrastructures, but that we may also find interesting possibilities on the macro level of digital library infrastructures. Moreover, at such a macro level we may find important new ways of collaborating and building digital libraries in educational settings.