Several members of the DILIGENT consortium participated in the EGEE User Forum which took place at CERN in Geneva from 1-3 March 2006. Davide Bernardini of partner CNR-ISTI presented a talk entitled "DILIGENT and Open DLib: long and short term exploitation of a gLite Grid Infrastructure".

According to Mr. Bernardini, the demand for Digital Libraries (DLs) has recently grown considerably, with DLs now being perceived by various communities as an instrument to enable collaboration and communication among members. Examples of such interested domains include e-Health, e-Learning and e-Government, and many organizations whose demand is for small, distributed and dynamic DLs to support temporary activities such as exhibitions or courses. Currently the investments needed to construct and manage a DL are very high due to the high costs of content production and multimedia handling.

The objective of DILIGENT is to create a Digital Library Infrastructure that will allow members of dynamic virtual research organizations to create on-demand, transient digital libraries based on shared computing, storage, multimedia, multi-type content, and application resources. Following this vision, DLs are not ends in themselves, but rather they become enabling technologies.

For the full text of Mr. Bernardini's talk or to view the accompanying slides, please see:

• http://indico.cern.ch/contributionDisplay.py?contribId=68&sessionId=11&confId=286.