Bernd Wegner: Position Statement

WDML related activities:

I was member of the steering committee for the DML planning group, funded by NSF in the period from 2002 to 2004. The report of this group still is available on the web page of CUL. It served as a recommendation for the further development of the DML, later called WDML. Together with Keith Dennis I was in charge of a proposal describing the potential content of the WDML. This proposal is part of the report. I was participant at most of the conferences and workshops reporting on and discussing the further progress of the WDML. In particular I organized two of these conferences myself as satellites to the ICM in Beijing and the ECM in Stockholm.

At the time when the planning group was active a first set of digital archives of mathematical publications already was available in digitally born or retro-digitized form. One of these digitally born archives was the Electronic Library of Mathematics (ELibM) in EMIS, which has been founded in the beginning of the 90ies. The ELibM developed under my guidance to one of the largest open access archives in mathematics, posting more than 100 journals now with a total of more than 60.000 publications. In the last decade a lot of new archives have been added to the WDML by national, society-based or publisher-based digitization projects. I had supervised the projects ERAM, digitizing the Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik and about 700.000 pages of back volumes of Springer journals, RusDML, digitizing 10 of the most important Russian mathematical journals, and EMANI, providing (temporary) access to digital archives at CUL (Ithaca), GDZ (Göttingen), CMD (Grenoble), and the enormous collection of digitized Chinese mathematics at Tsinghua University (Beijing) and discussing possibilities for the long-term preservation of digital documents in mathematics. RusDML is hosted by GDZ and GPNTB (Moscow) at present.

Proposals for the WDML:

I want to concentrate on the aspects I was dealing with previously, though there are many additional facilities to be developed, which will be the task of other parties present at this workshop. When I talk about WDML, I have all mathematical publications in mind, which are electronically available, let it be open access or charged access. The WDML of the workshop may be a different and a more reduced one. It will be more advanced simultaneously. The EuDML may be a prototype for this. But I think that it will be useful to think about two levels of the WDML, which will have to be described more precisely.

For the more comprehensive WDML it will be important to reiterate the considerations on the potential content, to compare the current development with what has been proposed by the NSF report mentioned above, and to see where the current gaps are, consisting of mathematical publications, which still are on paper only or provide a digital version of low usability and inferior quality. A first approximation where to go would be represented by the journals lists of ZBMATH, MathSciNet and MathEduc, possibly extended by those of RZMat and Chinese Mathematical Abstracts. To go further would depend on what the ideal content of the WDML should be. Caring about mathematical research only would be too narrow.

An important tool to monitor this will be a registry for the corresponding journals, other serials, series of monographs and book collections to be considered as part of the WDML. First ideas for this have been developed during the NSF project and EMANI already. They appeared as digitization registries. First releases have been offered under the name mini-DML. But they are far from being comprehensive, in particular because also publications should be listed, which are still waiting to be digitized, and because it is a lot of work to administrate such a registry.

Hence if anybody will ask me, if I am prepared to volunteer for the further development of the WDML, I would prefer to work on the extension of the content. Another expectation will be that the activities of the workshop will be summarized in a report comparable to that one for the NSF-project.