Some thoughts on the near-future digital mathematics library. (English) Zbl 1170.68483

Bouche, Thierry

Sojka, Petr (ed.), DML 2008. Towards digital mathematics library, Birmingham, UK, July 27th, 2008. Proceedings. Brno: Masaryk University (ISBN 978-80-210-4658-0/pbk). 3-15 (2008).

Summary: The mathematicians’ Digital mathematics library (DML) summarises the generous project that all mathematics ever published should end up in digital form so that it would be more easily referenced, accessed, used. This concept was formulated at the very beginning of this century, and yielded a lot of international activity that culminated around years 2002–2005. While it is estimated that a substantial part of the existing math literature is already available in some digital format, nothing looking like one digital mathematics library has emerged, but a multiplicity of competing electronic offers, with unique standards, features, business models, access policies, etc. The millenium’s appealing idea has become a new Tower of Babel.
After a quick overview of the idiosyncrasies of the mathematical literature with a historical perspective, we discuss strategies toward the implementation of a possibly tiny subset of the DML.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1158.00018].

MSC:

68P99

Theory of data

Keywords:

digital mathematics library: policy & implementation; microscopic DML