Dr. Hiroshi Inose(Director of NACSIS)

The borderlessness is already well-established in the manufacturing field; outsourcing is taking place worldwide to recruit labor having the necessary skills at reasonable cost, and various affiliated and cooperative relations are being developed among enterprises with an accelerated open policy.

In the service sector, the broadcasters who are taking advantage of wide-area coverage of broadcasting satellites are linking up with related service providers, such as program producers, and deploying their business globally . The communication service providers are also aggressively promoting international joint operations with an aim to compete in the world market. At the governmental level, borderless business is being strongly encouraged under the banner of free trade and deregulation. Especially, the U.S., which is confident of its global predominance in the information and communication-related production and service industries, has long been asserting that not only the trade of products but also the trade of services have to be totally free, bringing its case to GATT and now to WTO. The U.S. government also advocates the GII (Global Information Infrastructure) concept which is an extension of the NII (U.S. National Informtion Infrastructure) project and is playing a leading role to promote the concept at international meetings such as the G7. European countries are sensitive to such movements of the U.S. and are trying to strengthen their unity.

Convergence has been in progress in a variety of ways. In the past, the advent of data communications stimulated the need to combine computers and communication services and resulted in an overall reexamination of the communi-cation regulations. Today, discussion continues on the convergence of broadcasting and communication, but the forms of convergence involve not only broadcasting and communication services, employing terrestrial and satellite radio waves and optical fibers, but also those businesses which produce the contents such as programs, databases and software, thus encompassing a variety of traditional services. With the emergence of electronic publishing and electronic libraries, the integration and convergence of various information services including databases and libraries as well as printing, publishing and distribution are inevitable. In addition to convergence among the service providers, convergence among the users in different industrial sectors is in progress and further convergence between the service providers and users is anticipated. On the Internet, though in a premature form, the clients who are originally the users are sometimes acting as servers or service providers. Authors may thus be directly connected with readers through electronic publishing systems and readers may sometimes act as authors.

It should be noted that globalization and convergence are taking place at the same time. For the service providers, it is necessary to properly address the ever-changing needs of the users, while strengthening competitiveness by fully utilizing the multiplicative merits of globalization and convergence. For the users of services, it is necessary to select and use the optimum mode of convergence while strengthening ties with related users all over the world.

In order for service providers and users to take advantages of globalization and convergence, the government must have the courage to fundamentally restructure the old regulations and practices and positively adjust the existing vested interests. Protection of intellectual property rights, maintenance of interoperability, assurance of information authenticity, protection of privacy, and disclosure of public information must be promoted under international agreements.

NACSIS is located at a crossroad of globalization and convergence. It has worked to internationalize services such as networking, shared cataloging, interlibrary lending and information retrieval. We hope to expand such services on a global scale as well as to enrich services such as multiple language functions, multimedia functions and electronic libraries. It is my sincere wish that our friends both in Japan and abroad will continue to offer their support and cooperation.