At the same time, there remains a number of problem areas. However, it was agreed that, given the ability of current and emerging technologies, the overall issues and problems remained valid both in shorter and longer term. A continuum of research is needed rather than a major paradigm shift. As a result the meeting identified three key areas for future research work, with a further two issues cutting across all three. This leads to work in collaboration technologies and tools, intelligent user interfaces, manipulation and presentation capabilities.
Standards affect all three areas.
Fast and lightweight standards are likely to be needed if their acceptance is to match the rate of technical change and if sustainable and affordable solutions are to be created for what is predominantly a financially challenged, public sector domain. The second cross-issue is 'informing organisms', i.e. self organising, cooperating, simple and complex, intelligent components, which will be needed at all levels of the digital library application model. Emphasis should be placed as much on proof of concept demonstrators as on fully fledged prototypes, immediately scaleable and close to market. This leads to different and potentially conflicting models. This needs to be driven by personalisation, by presenting different user-views of the content, rather than by differentiating the content itself.