German universities are becoming an "University2.0"

The University2.0 is the most ideal way of accessing and sharing information. Moreover the University promotes itself by showing how research is done, how it proceeds and offering results and various documents for free and in one virtual place as a one-stop-shop.
In response to the need to acquire, to index, to store, and to provide documents which are increasingly only available in digital form, the Thuringian University and State Library (ThULB) and the University Data Processing Centre (URZ) began in 1999 with the composition of a digital library called UrMEL (University Multimedia Electronic Library). UrMEL will make it possible to combine the Friedrich Schiller University's (FSU) various activities for the provision of multimedia and historical documents. Since UrMEL can already integrate different projects and serve as a project platform for them, it forms the basis for the integration of further institutions in Thuringia. This is true not only of libraries, but also of museums, archives, and other cultural institutions.
Already realized are the following projects: University@UrMEL, Journals@UrMEL, and Collections@UrMEL.

• University@UrMEL
  
  Within the scope of the Digital Library Thuringia University@UrMEL provides online access to university documents such as doctoral theses, dissertations, research
  reports, and lecture scripts. It serves as a platform for accessing course materials. Audio and video recordings in different formats are also available at University@UrMEL.

• Journals@UrMEL
  
  Journals@UrMEL provides access to electronic journals. Via digitalization, historical journals are made more easily accessible, and are at the same time prevented from decaying. In cooperation with scientific publishers and societies, the ThULB increasingly also publishes online journals itself. In addition to this, the ThULB also purchases online journals from publishers, stores them, and makes them accessible on its own servers.

• Collections@UrMEL
  
  Within Collections@UrMEL, we work together with scholars from different areas to develop special applications for the digital and multimedia editing and indexing of valuable stock from archives and manuscript collections.

For more information please visit the project's website

On Novenber the 10th there will take place a special symposion about UrMEL. According to the program it really looks like as if the institution's libraries are fully integrated into digitazation, multimedia editing and indexing documents.

Let's hope this project leads to reshaping german universities into a real "University2.0" - which is more than only storing data and information in one place.