The Virtual Library

The key ideas embodied in the notion of the Virtual Library are that: the library contains many types of information in different forms, and particularly in forms other than paper; all this information must be accessible to users located not at the physical library but in their homes, schools, hospitals or clinics; this information travel quickly to the users who need it; and one must be able to navigate easily from one database containing one kind of information, say citations, to another containing, say, medical images. The virtual library is becoming a reality because of the fortuitous convergence of several developments: digital image engineering, affordable power at the desktop, and the increasing ubiquity of the Internet. The Lister Kill Center, an R&D division of the National Library of Medicine, is conducting projects that incorporate these ideas and take advantage of these developments. The projects to be discussed involve document images, digitized x-ray images, and three-dimensional volumetric data of the human body. Proceedings of the Eighth Annual IEEE Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS '95) 1063-7125/95 $10.00 © 1995 IEEE