Computers and the availability of the World Wide Web have significantly changed the conditions for the production and reception of dictionaries. For editors of scholarly dictionaries the Internet is not only a source of inspiration, it also generates new and serious challenges:

• to give users easier access to scholarly dictionaries and to bridge the gap between the general public and scholarly dictionaries;
• to establish both a broader and more systematic exchange of expertise and common standards and solutions;
• to develop a common approach to e-lexicography that forms the basis for a new type of lexicography that fully embraces the pan-European nature of much of the vocabularies of the languages spoken in Europe. The proposed Action aims to establish a European network of lexicographers in order to deal with the above issues in a structured way.