The Russian-British Digital Libraries Workshop took place on 16-17 June 1999. It was organised as a distributed videoconference with the central site in Moscow (based at the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences) and active remote sites in Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novgorod the Great, and Yaroslavl. Besides, a number of organisations in Moscow and Moscow Region, in Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Region, and in Rostov could follow the workshop in a passive mode via the Internet.

The workshop was attended by managers of Russian, British and other European projects dealing with digital libraries or their prototypes; by IT experts, librarians and archivists, museum workers, specialists of information centres and publishers, as well as representatives of State an City authorities and business community – in general specialists from 19 cities (12 Russian, 6 British and 1 Italian) and 96 organisations. Implementation of new information and communication technologies made it possible to extend the workshop audience from 180 people registered in Moscow to 385 on all participating sites.

The participants of the Russian-British Digital Library Workshop, after the final discussion, have considered it to be necessary:

1. To continue to conduct such workshops on a regular basis (at least ones a year).
2. With the respect to the fact that DL is a relatively new concept in both countries, to organise two working meetings for its further promotion – one in Russia in late 1999 and one in UK in early 2000 ã. These meetings should be attended by DL project managers and representatives of respective authorities. It is necessary to exchange information, to start partnerships, and to draft a plan for future co-operation.
3. Founding on the results of above meetings to start preparing a continued co-operation programme between Russian and British organisations involved in DL activities, with a financial support of funding agencies of both countries.
4. To suggest that the British Council in Russia should support creation of a special bilingual DL glossary.
5. To entrust the organising committee to make the materials of the workshop widely available for the public.
6. To publish on the workshop web site the list of its participants with contact information.
7. While drafting programmes for the following similar DL workshops to pay more attention to the following aspects: public access to digital libraries, regional initiatives, examples of DL of classical type, measuring parameters of a digital library, practical experience of international co-operation.

The participants have expressed sincere gratitude to the British Council Russia, Russian Foundation for Basic Research, Institute of the Information Society – Russia, the Research and Education Computer Network FREEnet and all organisers who did their best to make this workshop possible. They also have expressed hope that the above organisations will preserve their leading role in preparing and conducting similar events and will contribute more to to the development of the Russian-British co-operation in the field of digital libraries.