Message from the Workshop Chairman

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to Taipei for the 2002 APEC Workshop on e-Learning and Digital Libraries. Digital libraries development has great potential for every APEC member economy to transform digital divide into digital opportunity. The purpose of the workshop is to bring together experts and delegates of APEC member economies to exchange their experiences on how to explore the ways in which digital libraries can be utilized to preserve, disseminate, and cultivate human civilization and to change our way of life, education, and knowledge discovery. In the workshop Chinese Taipei, the host of the workshop, plans to share with APEC member economies their experiences of the practices of the National Science and Technology Program for Digital Archives, which was officially launched in January 2002.

This five-day interdisciplinary workshop will feature 24 presentations on e-learning and digital content development. It will offer a series of tutorials including Digital Archives Development, Digital Archives Technologies, e-Learning and Digital Content Construction, Training, Promotion and Applications. In the last two days of this workshop we will have a joint conference with ICDAT2002 (2002 International Conference on Digital Archive Technologies) on more advanced topics, followed by a panel discussion to discuss future international collaboration possibilities and establishment of a digital content exchange and sharing mechanism.

Special thanks should go to our invited speakers, especially those from abroad: Christine Borgman of University of California at Los Angeles, David Dawson of Resource: the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, Judith Graves of Library of Congress, William Mischo of University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, Jane Chu Prey of National Science Foundation, Joyce Ray of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Scott Sayre of the U.S. Office of the Art Museum Image Consortium, William E. Underwood of Georgia Tech Research Institute and Kris Wetterlund of ArtsConnectEd. Thank you very much.

I would like to thank all the delegates of APEC member economies for participating in the workshop, and thank all the participants. Without your participation, this workshop would not be as successful.

This workshop intends to provide a forum for all the participants, delegates of APEC member economies and speakers to exchange their viewpoints and experiences on e-learning and digital archives. I hope you will find this workshop exciting and informative. In the meantime I am looking forward to seeing more international collaboration in preserving human civilization and furthering cultural heritages of mankind.

Der-Tsai Lee

December 16, 2002