WELCOME

The motivation for this initiative has emerged after several joint activities between the European countries participating in the WDML digitization project.

Many European mathematical societies, national libraries and documentation centres have been collaborating in order to prepare  digitization projects at a European level, including the so-called DML-EU initiative under the auspices of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Also, an European FP5 project called LIMES (Large Infrastructure in Mathematics, Enhanced Services) for re-organizing the existing bibliographical databases and reviewing services on an European basis was funded by the EC during 2000-04.

Several workshops and meetings were held in the last years, including Berlingen (2002, 2003), Gottingen (2003), Stockholm (2004), Aveiro (2006), Prague and Birmingham (2008). Among the participants were representatives of the EMS, members of European mathematical societies as well as staff people from digitization centres and libraries.

Through these activities the mathematical community has become more and more involved in topics such as:

• The need for standardization and coordination,
• Identification of intellectual property rights
• Conflict of interests among stakeholders
• Technical standards, metadata
• Long term preservation
• Importance of bibliographical databases

However, all attempts to structure the efforts at a transnational level have failed so far.

This ESF Preparatory Meeting  should serve for exploring the creation of an European infrastructure for Mathematics, focused on digitization, access to research journals, doctoral dissertations and bibliographical databases.

Objectives

It is hoped that with the aid from ESF, a core group of key players representing the European mathematical community will be established. This group will then promote the idea of, and develop the necessary actions for such a future large scale Europe infrastructure for bibliographical support to research. The steps, as currently identified, are to:

1. Make available to the implicated ESF Standing Committees and scientific communities this initiative

2. Identify a number of representatives of societies and leading scientists engaged in the topic.

3. After the workshop, to prepare a European perspective on the topic and make recommendations of a future collaborative programme

4. Write several reports and surveys about such topics as:

• Integration of existing centres
• Acquisition of new content
• Interoperability with reviewing databases, publishers platforms and open archives
• Finding balanced policies and a sustainable model