10.5 Internetworking Aspects of Digital Libraries:...

Multimedia libraries are DLs, where the managed content is not restricted to the usually mainly textual documents. Such libraries contain, next to the "textual" contents, media types like music, videos, images, maps, and mixtures of different content types (multimedia objects) as they are, for example used in e-Learning or in the documentation of history (Neuhold and Niederee). Multimedia libraries may also contain content types that were not supported in traditional libraries like 3D objects, executable software (e.g. computer games) or callable services.

One of the main challenges for a multimedia library is to provide effective access to these types of context (based on adequate indexing) while providing support for the "real-time" integration of different content types. Some challenges of multimedia libraries are closely related to those of museums and archives that make multimedia representations of their artifacts available online (Neuhold and Niederee).