The National Library of China plans to set up the largest Chinese Information Repository on the Net.

Liu Gang, vice-director of the information networks department at the library made this remark while playing a video highlighting an experimental digital library.

The digital library will enable visitors to step into the Beijing Imperial Palace, for example, and learn about ancient Chinese culture and art.

There are five repositories at the National Library of China - "Beijing Imperial Palace" "Ancient Chinese Poems", "Ancient Chinese Architecture", "Sea World" and "Structure of the Universe" which will become fully digitized in the near future.

In the future, digital libraries will be able to gather information from a number of large repositories, some of which come from Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as Singapore where different coding systems are used, Liu said.

"We're now working to digitize China's 5,000 years of history and bring together distributed information sources in a manner that makes them logically appear as part of some larger integrated system, even though information is distributed in different websites."

Liu called on libraries, archives and data banks to work closely in digitizing their special collections. The Chinese National Digital Library is scheduled to go on line next year.