Minoru Ashizawa

Using digital libraries as a community hall for worldwide information spiral development

Our concept of a digital library from a users viewpoint is explained by using a three-layer model of information 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.