ad of Microsoft, Corbis is a main provider
of visual content and services in the digital age, offering more than 20 million
photographs and fine-art images (and 1,3 on-line) for access worldwide via the
Internet, on CD-ROM disc, and through traditional stock catalogs. The images
includes contemporary stock photography, photojournalism, archival photography,
and royalty-free images, available to both creative professionals and private
consumers.

7.4. Future Trends for Digital Libraries

The quick development of digital libraries leads us to define the role of the
digital library, a very recent concept, relating to the much older "traditional"
library, and vice versa.

In the same way that the paper document is not going to be "killed" by the
electronic document, at least not in the near future, many librarians believe
the "traditional" library is not going to be "killed" by the digital library.

When interviewed by Jerome Strazzulla in Le Figaro of June 3, 1998, Jean-Pierre
Angremy, president of the French National Library (Bibliotheque nationale de
France) stated: "We cannot, we will not be able to digitize everything. In the
long term, a digital library will only be one element of the whole library".

Digital libraries give instant access to many works in the public domain. They
also give instant access to old and rare texts and images. The full-screen
images are still quite long to download, so many sites were backed up to present
small images, so as not to ask too much from the cybernaut's patience. Most of
the time a bigger format can be requested by clicking on the selected image.
This problem should be solved in the future with improvements in data
transmission.

The digital libraries also further the textual research on one or several works
at the same time, such as the works of Shakespeare, Dante's Divine Comedy,
different versions of The Bible, etc.

The major problem of the cyberlibrary is the fact that recent documents cannot
be posted because they don't belong to the public domain. Some projects, like
DOI: The Digital Identifier System, an identification system for digital media,
will enable automated copyright management systems.

Another problem is format harmonization, to allow the downloading of the texts
by any hardware and software. Libraries often choose the ASCII format (ASCII:
American standard code for information interchange) or the SGML format (SGML:
standard generalized markup languag