This revolution in the information industry is causing a fusion between electronic publishing and networks. Until now, the publisher, distributor, book seller, and library separated the author from the end user, but because of these changes in the industry, each of their respective services are being forced to change.
The developments in library computer systems first began with the digitization of secondary information. The extension of this into the digitization of the primary information, namely the library collections themselves, brings forth different issues. Primary among these is copyright. How this is addressed and which directions libraries take will be the most important issues in the future.
From Maruzen's position, the CALIS Library System, DIALOG, Uncover, Japanese document processing systems, electronic publishing and other offerings, represent different ways in which digitized information can be connected with library functions.
Libraries and businesses must work together to assure the existence of high quality information, and from a business point of view libraries that are aiming toward total digitization have common goals that need to be defined and realized. The partnership and alliance of libraries and vendors is an important issue, and both parties need to work together in order to assure their future.
This paper describes a light-weight browser for multilingual documents in the WWW environment. The browser displays HTML text written in a foreign language but requires no preloaded fonts for that language. This paper presents a document description scheme for multilingual documents called MHTML. It also shows a prototype MHTML browser and its performance.