The United States model of a National Digital Library Federation is an interesting one. In fact, at this meeting, a colleague has suggested to me that the National Library should call together a small group of presently active players in digitization to discuss how we might best focus our efforts in Canada. This has been a stimulating and illuminating two days. We have been challenged to think about many basic concepts of digital knowledge. Bandwidth is the word of the day.
High bandwidth is critical to the development of digital knowledge systems.
Bandwidth is becoming cheaper and more abundant, but what haunts me in so many of these discussions is that we have to be careful not to assume that this high-bandwidth capability will be available to everyone soon. We must remember that there will be some segments of society that will not have access to it, at least within this decade. We will have to look at hybrid systems, at a variety of access methodology. I live 90 kilometres northwest of Toronto, and even there, in telecommunications terms, I am relatively disenfranchised compared with someone in Metro Toronto. Wireless systems have been talked about in this conference as a panacea for connectivity and access problems.