At the moment mostly an ineffective manual task as the user is unaware of the contents of each individual library in terms of their quantity, quality, information type, provenance and likely relevance. Because of this people need accurate automatic selection tools to assist them to select the information resources they require. Once a set of libraries is selected and searched, a person must organise and interpret the information supplied by different Digital Libraries, which might well be in the form of multimedia. Usually, this is performed through visual evaluation and ad hoc integration which forces users to restrict their attention to a small proportion of the information they are able to retrieve. As the number of Digital Libraries grows this problem increases correspondingly. This hinders the ability of information providers to increase access to scarce and/or unique resources. People need user interfaces that enable them to exploit more fully the multimedia information they find.

MIND will assist users to:

• know where to search;
• how to query different media;
• and how to combine information from diverse sources.

The key objective of the MIND project is to address the problems faced by users in terms of their ability to access and exploit the increasing number of Digital Libraries available internationally through networks, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW). More specifically the objective is to design models and to build sets of tools and associated test-beds to improve the effectiveness of resource selection, multimedia information access, retrieval and fusion of the retrieved data.