German Initiative of Networked Information

(Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation – DINI)

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a great pleasure for me to speak to you here in London during the LIBER-Conference.

I come from Humboldt-University at Berlin in Germany. I am the head of the computing centre and also one of the speaker of the German Initiative for Networked Information.

I want to give you few details, both, about our ideas, our motivation to found DINI, our primary objectives, our intended methods and steps we have taken so far.

I will start with a problem description, to speak a little bit about the Foundation of DINI and give you some examples how DINI works.

How can we describe the present problem, I will try it by an example

If a scientist wanted or needed to create a so-called multimedia presentation for educational purposes, he would soon find himself confronted with a lot of problems. He would maybe want to integrate to integrate video- and audio materials, some pictures, floattext, computer animation, the results of a library investigation or the output of a database query. This list is by no means complete, yet every feature alone comes with its own potential difficulties.

Besides, various forms of input may result in different forms of output, such as a

Videoconference, a World Wide Web presentation or a CD-Rom – to name only a few.

This slide wants to show the difficulties in producing such a multimedia show on the one hand and the difficulties to find the corresponding university institution to support the production, on the other.

In Germany, at present, it is not clearly defined, which department or institution is responsible for the individual tasks – which is why in most cases you will have to turn to numerous departments for the matter.

I believe this is a typical example of present situation and require a converging of services between libraries and IT-services. But from my point of view the requirements and expectations of scientists and students are the originators or determinedly facts.

There is a change in requirements and the service institutions of a university have to react.

Such a working place is characterised by

· computer based
they use different computer from PC up to a high-performance computer

· multimedia
A scientist needs for his work paper, electronic documents, audio and video materials

· access to the world wide knowledge base around the world like libraries, databases; electronic information systems and so on

· electronic communication via e-mail, video-conferences

· Typical for a scientist is to work independence from location at the desk in the university, at home, at abroad

The traditional tasks for the three institutions library, computing centre and media-centre in the past are well known, clear distinction in responsibility and relatively small overleap.

The libraries were responsible for acquisition, storage, and providing of literature – mainly paper based at the time.

The media Centres were offering consultation services and were involved in the production of Audio- and Video sequences, analogue material for the most part. In addition they usually offered a special service for video and audio equipment.

The major task of the Computing Centres was to provide for sufficient computing power and storage capacity for their host institutions. They had to organise the computer-related infrastructure and occasionally, to develop computer programs for the academic staff.

In other words: The individual responsibilities of the university service institutions were obvious to their users.

Nowadays we have some new tasks and different responsibilities.

The libraries now have additional tasks:
to provide and store scientific material based on electronic documents, to organize and ensure access to electronic information-systems, to name only theses two.

The media Centres now deal with all kind of multimedia material - like computer-supported video-sequences and the like.

Computing centres now frequently have to deal with electronic information Systems like Word Wide Web, to organise the access to those and to support their users in the process of creating their own Web-pages. An additional service, for instance, should provide for computer video conferences.

Three scenarios shall demonstrate potential problems of collaboration activities that may result from the change mentioned above..

· Undoubtedly, a library now has to store electronic documents along with paper based forms. Conversely, archival services have always been among the traditional tasks for a computing centre. In most cases there are big storage robots and a lot of know-how organizing this kind of procedures. The question arises, whether it is necessary for the library to build up its own electronic archive.

· The media-centre were the first to produce analogue video films. Nowadays they also use computer based Video-cutting stations and other high tech equipment and have got the know-how in some techniques of audio, light and camera-using. At the same time, computing centres are faced with a growing demand for support of visualisation projects.

· Most media-centres host a media library, where everyone can borrow video- and audio-material as well as CD-Roms. But then any modern library also provides access to CD-ROM, ,mostly via computer network.

These are additional examples which make it necessary to work together closer and closer.

A special group of member of three German organizations

- German Library Association (Deutscher Bibliotheksverband)

- Society of the Centres for Communication and Information Processing (ZKI)

- Association of Media Centers at German Universities (AMH)

worked out ten theses concerning the situation of the infrastructure at German universities, which have been published under the title "Information-Infrastructure in Change - Challenges for the Universities and their Information- and Communication Centers" at www.tu-dresden.de/agbibrz/

Due to an advanced organization and the division of labour among universities, colleges and their infrastructural institutions, the supply of services is going to progressively improve. Tasks focusing on different objectives need to be distributed accordingly, thus generating a coordinated structure of virtual libraries, computer- and media centres.

Apart from their regular responsibilities, the local infrastructural institutions will also be in charge of organizing the supply of shared services. In addition to the collaboration among the infrastructural institutions, we also need to build partnerships with businesses, publishers and computer technologists in order to develop new standards and forms of publication. For that, we need to combine all available forces and build an organization that is equivalent to the American ”Coalition for networked information”.

Considering thesis ten, we decided that it would be better to organize the joint work, if we created an organization.

In consequence, during a following reunion we founded the "Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformation (German Initiative for Networked Information).

Let me short explain the primary objectives and the major topics in our present work

I want to give you some examples for common work in Germany which demonstrate the beginning of the necessarily cooperation between the different service institutions of a university.

At first the project MILESS from the University of Essen:

MILESS is a learning and teaching server for multimedia-documents. It is a common project of computing centre, library and media-centre. Also involved in this project are different departments of the university. They started together with the department of linguistic and department of physics. Nowadays a lot of departments are involved.

It is the aim to store and retrieve any form of documents which are produced in this university. That means text based documents, pictures, videos, multimedia teaching materials and so on.

The computing centre is responsible for technical basic. They designed the system and developed some program scripts. The whole system based on the IBM-Content manager (former IBM Digital Library).

The library is responsible for the cataloguing the materials and the media-centre is responsible for all non-text-oriented materials.

I believe that is a good example for the necessity of cooperation. No of these organisations were able to do it for their own.

Another example of cooperation is a part of the present work of DINI.

At present in DINI five working groups are working. One of these Working groups deals with the “management of Public internet working places”. In a lot of different university institutions you can find public computer Places, especially in Library, Computing centre and so on. In every Institution are the same problems, how can we organize the work, how can manage the user accounts, how can we realize that every user get only access to those resources which he or she is warrantable. In this DINI-Group specialists from Libraries, Computing centres and media-centres are involved.

The aim of this working group is to create an recommendation paper for the German universities. The major topics of this paper shall be the points which I show on my slice.

That is a picture from a webcam which observe the process of a new building for my university. It is a new building for the service institutions of the University in Berlin Adlershof inside a special campus for the departments for mathematics and natural sciences. A new building for the computing centre, the media centre and a part of our Library.

The new idea of the service from this new building should demonstrate the next slice.

This slide should show that we will change our present concept

Using the possibilities of a new building we want to offer several different services of the different institutions together. The users in Adlershof that are scientists and students of the University, scientist of non-university institutions and members of small private companies will get the demanded support from one hand. This does not mean that three service institutions fuse into one institution. But we will offer a consulting and competence centre for computer software , Internet using and library research together. We plan for Adlershof common reading and computer desks, video cutting places, rooms and places for video conferences and also communication regions.

We hope that we can open this new building in the middle of the next year.

The change of information infrastructures is a duty, challenge and chance for the service institutions.

The duty that means, that the service institutions have to realise the demands of the university.

The challenge that means, that the service institutions should not only react but should play an active and trend setting role in the university.

Chance that means, that connected to every change is the possibility to give the institution a new orientation in the university.

Thank you very much for your attention.