The afternoon of day two included a panel session on the topic “Digital Libraries in Central and Eastern Europe: Infrastructure Challenges for the New Europe”. There were representatives from Croatia, Lithuania, Hungary and Slovenia, and each presented an outline of where their country is currently at with developments in digital libraries, and some of the challenges faced including infrastructure concerns, Open Access, funding and small language group difficulties.

An interesting point for me was the resistance to Open Access from some countries. There is still a significant fear of plagarism, and even theses are not openly available in some places. There are groups of people meeting to try to find others of a like mind (who support OA), but at this stage it seems that progress is still halting.

From a linguistics point of view, the difficulties faced by the small language groups can be sizeable. For the 10mill Hungarian speakers, 3mill Lithuanian speakers and 2mill Slovenian speakers, challenges such as working out metadata schemas for these relatively small language groups exist. It is recognised though, that digital libraries are a way of ‘advertising’ a country, which helps to gain support for this work.

In all of the discussion that took place, one point which I would have liked to hear about is collaboration between the countries. I would be interested to hear more about how these countries progress, and whether collaboration is, or becomes a means for progression. Each of the countries represented has some challenges that are similar to their counterparts, and some that are unique. In most of these challenges, a degree of collaboration could certainly assist future development in digital libraries.