Leisure and Cultural Service Department, HKSAR

The national agenda of China for the coming decades has been defined as Transformation 2.0, in essence moving from a low-knowledge-content and low-value-added industrial economy to a high-knowledge-content and high-value-added industrial, service and innovation-driven economy. One of the pre-conditions for that to happen is the construction of an infrastructure for the transformation of learning, of knowledge access, sharing and diffusion. Knowledge workers could not be developed in abundance without a learning environment conducive to that.

Digital library is one of those infrastructural building efforts which national, municipal and city governments could actively engage in for upgrading human talent pools.

The reformation of the knowledge ecology in Hong Kong has always been guided by visionaries, of which the digital library initiative is no exception. The digital library vision is to bring the library to the people. With that in place the public could now learn whenever and wherever learning is due, forever changing the previous learning regime where access were limited to the privileged few. This knowledge diffusion revolution could somewhat be compared to the printing press revolution brought on by Gutenberg, but this time on a universal access scale. For quite some time now, a few visionaries within the Hong Kong Central Library have been converting Hong Kong’s specific knowledge treasures into digital form. In fact The Hong Kong Digital Library initiative was so advanced in its time that its successful implementation was completed well ahead of Google and Wikipedia, two other innovations which are complementary and illustrative of the ways knowledge delivery could be transformed.

ICO is there. ICO’s presence has been crystallized into the MMIS (Multimedia Information System). The MMIS is a world class digital library, managing one of the largest public multi-media contents and one of the world’s largest public digital newspaper archives ( from 1864-1991 and onwards).

Since this System was so innovative in world terms, it has gone on to score numerous international and local awards. Its presence is a testimony of the Government’s determination to transform Hong Kong into a knowledge society.