PurposeThe purpose of this article is to introduce the digital libraries of the future, their enabling technologies and their organisational models.Design/methodology/approachThe paper first discusses the requirements for the digital libraries of the future, then presents the DILIGENT infrastructure as a technological response to these requirements and, finally, it discusses the role that libraries can play in the organisational framework envisioned by DILIGENT.FindingsDigital libraries of the future will give access to a large variety of multimedia and multi‐type documents created by integrating content from many different heterogeneous sources that range from repositories of text, images, and audio‐video, to scientific data archives, and databases. The digital library will provide a seamless environment where the co‐operative access, filtering, manipulation, generation, and preservation of these documents will be supported as a continuous cycle. Users of the library will be both consumers and producers of information, either by themselves or in collaborations with other users. Policy ensuring mechanisms will guarantee that the information produced is visible only to those who have the appropriate rights to access it. The realisation of these new digital libraries requires both the provision of a new technology and a change in the role played by the libraries in the information access‐production cycle.Practical implicationsDigital libraries of the future will be core instruments for serving a large class of applications, especially in the research field.Originality/valueThe paper briefly introduces one of the most innovative technologies for digital libraries, and it discusses how it contributes to the realisation of a novel digital libraries scenario.