Abstract

Libraries, not only research libraries but also public libraries, have been fundamentally affected by the immense spread of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Many public libraries have their Web pages, through which they are providing their new and conventional services. There are also web sites which provide library-like services. This paper shows an experimental project named Internet Public Library Asia, which provides information in multiple languages of information resources published in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. This paper firstly overviews how traditional public libraries have been affected by the Internet. Then, it describes a few aspects from the viewpoint of crucial library function on the Internet and also from the viewpoint of Asian resources and users. This paper secondly proposes a model to serve information about valuable resources published in multiple Asian languages, and then shows the metadata schema and a few software tools developed for IPL-Asia The name of IPL is borrowed from Internet Public Library based at University of Michigan, since it is, in part, a collaborative activity with the IPL in Michigan. The metadata schema is defined based both on Dublin Core and IEEE LOM and adapted for parallel description in the four languages, i. e. , Chinese, Japanese, Korean and English. The software tools provide functions to support collaboration among people engaged in development of metadata database and metadata editing. These tools have been developed based on the XML technologies.