Dear colleagues,
After two and a half days of a wide-ranging program, a diversity of themes, and intense discussion, I would like to thank all the speakers, contributors and participants and especially the organisers of this conference.
For me the main results of our common activity can be summarised in three points:
We can see that the developers of OAI can be left to do a good job and we have good reason to support their activities
The goal of interoperability through OAI-servers can be achieved using the normal investment in IT-infrastructure in our institutions.
A suitable structure for information and communication interchange is essential for the development of digital universities, research institutions and libraries.
The real imperative is to use OAI standards in all our developments. If we wish to build a functioning web-based information and communication system for the international research community, we do not, perhaps, need one server in every institution, but as many document-servers as possible should be OAI-servers, for research material as well as for dissertations and journals from publishers and learned societies.
LIBER as the leading European association of research libraries will
promote the development of the OAI at the European as well as at the national level
spread promotional material devised by the OAI steering group or with their help
apply for grants for awareness-raising and training activities from the European Commission.
LIBER will act not as a management group but as an intermediary for the communication process between the different players. This is why we will try to get finance for a follow-up conference in the spring of 2002.
I hope that our host and our organisers are willing to do the hard work of arranging a conference once again for us. In this sense I would like to thank you all again and say good-bye, au revoir and Auf Wiedersehen.
Elmar Mittler
president
of LIBER
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From: Corrado Pettenati, CERN Head Librarian
The CERN Library is happy and proud to accept the proposal. It will be a privilege to welcome all those interested in the OAI to Geneva in 2002.
See you soon at CERN again!