The meeting was held in Singapore, as was the 8th meeting and Mr. Ramachandran, Director of the National Library of Singapore, became the chairman. This meeting was held in a more practical and smaller way than the last time and the number of the countries that sent participants was reduced from 19 to 14. 
 

Each participant presented a country report, but the tight schedule meant that only two or three topics per country could be reported. I spoke about the opening of the International Library of Children's Literature and the start of the legal deposit system for electronic publications. 

We confirmed that Australia will continue to maintain the CDNLAO web page. Then the publication form of the CDNLAO Newsletter, which is published both in paper form and online, became a matter at issue. Some countries eagerly requested the paper form to be continued because of infrastructure problems, so we reached agreement to publish in paper form at least until 2002. In the end, the venue of the next meeting was argued about. No country offered to be host country and we could not reach agreement. 
 
 
 

2. The e-tlas conference 2001 (April 23 & 24, 2001 in Singapore)

The e-tlas (Emerging Trends in Library & Archival Service) conference held by the National Library of Singapore and the National Archives of Singapore on April 23 and 24, 2001 at the Singapore International Convention and Exhibition Centre. The number of the participants was about 270; 100 people were from outside of Singapore, most from Malaysia. The number of the countries was 20, mainly of Southeast Asia, then Europe, America and East Asia. 

Day One: April 23, 2001

The program of the first day consisted of the opening address by Mr. Ramachandran, the keynote address by Mr. Cathro, the National Library of Australia, and six general sessions by the National Library of Singapore, the Shanghai Library, China, the State Library of Victoria, Australia, the National Heritage Board, Singapore, the Library of Congress, USA and CISCO USA, a private consulting company. 

Keynote address
Mr. Cathro, National Library of Australia, presented a report called "Visions for fundamental change in libraries and librarianship in Asia Pacific". Libraries and archival institutions are encountering unprecedented pressures for change, arising largely from the emergence of the World Wide Web. He discussed those challenges in the framework of the key imperatives of support for public education, contribution to cultural development, preservation of national heritage for posterity, and information management. 
Libraries and archival institutions need to support flexible online learning services; support collaborative cross-sectional cultural programs; respond to the challenge of digital preservation and encourage a program of research and collaboration; manage traditional and digital collections in an integrated manner; manage text in different scripts in an integrated manner; and ensure constant access to digital information resources. 
This report posed challenges to solve these problems. He pointed that most electronic publishers and web developers are only concerned with finding better ways of facilitating current information access and do not have any concern about how this information might be accessed in future, and how it might be cited reliably over time. As he pointed out, it is the library and the archive that should secure access to electronic information. 
 I think most of the problems that Asia-Pacific libraries are encountering, including diversity of scripts, are shown clearly in this report and these problems are also common to the strategic challenges to the Japanese libraries. 

General Session
The title of the General Session was " Transforming Centres of Excellence" and six speakers made presentations introducing each institute’s challenges. Summaries of the several presentations are below. 

Dr. C. Chia, Chief Executive of the National Library Board of Singapore, introduced the experiences and results of recent changes in the National Library of Singapore. From 1995, the Library has been making large-scale changes in its library services. The Library’s paradigms shifted to: market driven, service-oriented information provider, multimedia, library without walls, library comes to you, just-in-time, global reach and value-added services. This report introduced experiences and remarkable results such as great increase of the number of the library users. 

Prof. Miao Qihao, Deputy Director of the Shanghai Library, China, spoke of the efforts of the Shanghai Library in transforming itself. After renewal and its brilliant "New Building Effect", the Shanghai Library is trying to upgrade the think tank function and launched the Knowledge Base Project on a five-year plan starting in 2001. 

Mrs. F. Awcock, Chief Executive and State Librarian, State Library of Victoria, Australia, introduced the challenges of the State Library of Victoria. From the mid 90s, the Library started to rebuild its facilities and conducted research on the expectations of the library user. To fulfil these expectations, they are trying to restructure service delivery, build a virtual library, develop a state network of information resources and libraries, secure non-government resources and reshape the Library workforce. As a result, the Library is transforming a 19th century institution to meet user needs in the 21st century. 

Mr. W. Tabb, Associate Librarian for Library Services of the Library of Congress (LC), USA, introduced a huge brand-new project. The LC focuses on digital contents and set the Strategic Digital Initiatives. The project secures $ 115 million of 5-year budgets and 84 permanent employees. The contents of the project will be: retrospective conversion, constructing a bilingual and multimedia English-Russian digital library, legal deposit for born digital works, and acquisition and preservation of born digital content. A report called The LC21: a Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress, submitted last summer, recommends a way of building and preserving a digital collection. The House of Representatives appropriated $ 100 million to the project last year-end and the project will now be launched. 

Day Two: April 24, 2001

The second day proceeded in section meetings. In the morning, working group discussion and presentations were held, and in the afternoon, section meetings called Parallel Tracks were held, finishing with a conference summery and future directions. 

In the morning I attended a working group called "Preservation for Long Term Access". There was discussion based on the report from the National Archives of Singapore. The discussion focused on the reliability of microfilm, and most of attendants gave it a high valuation. 

In the afternoon, I attended a section meeting called "Connecting Libraries in the New Millennium" and Mr. P. H. Jorgensen of the Danish Bibliographic Centre, reported. The role of the digital library in the digital era is very large and the legal and technical problems are also very large. We should set standards and cooperate with each other to solve these problems. He introduced the European Union project to connect major library institutions in Finland, Sweden Norway, Denmark, United Kingdom, Austria and Hungary. This information was quite useful for me. 
 

Conclusion

The object of these two international conferences was to show the latest movements in the library and archival services. All sessions seemed to meet this object and were substantial. I think most of the information provided in these conferences was also useful for Japanese librarians. 

On the other hand, I found from the conversations at the evening party that there is a big variation of circumstances within Southeast Asian libraries. I saw an example at the CDNLAO meeting: some national libraries are still forced to rely only on the paper form to get information that should be promptly reported. 

The importance of cooperation between the National Diet Library and the libraries of the Southeast Asian countries is increasing. Through the experience of attending these conferences, I fully realized that to construct cooperative relationships with other countries, we should understand our partners carefully and accurately.