High quality imaging, audio and video are areas of experimentation with digital libraries. Increasing technology will allow digital libraries to incorporate multiple multimedia technologies at once for problems solving and research. Other issues include visualization and searching techniques, and distributing digital library technology through multicast. Some current digital library initiatives are listed below. The variations project is one application of digital libraries.
Variations is a digital library of information for the study of music.
Variations allows students, faculty, an eventually web users to access vast amounts of information related to music study. Over 5000 titles of digital audio are available to aid in musical study. The use of digital libraries will allow for increased amounts of multimedia technologies such as musical scores, digital audio, and high-resolution images. The variations project seeks to provide higher quality audio and accessible to a wider range of people, including students using slow, remote access connections. Although multimedia audio portions are currently unavailable to users outside of Indiana University, the digital library s textual material is searchable via the web.