European-US Working Groups in Digital Libraries Research

European and United States scientists are engaged in large-scale digital library research and development. However, although digital libraries are inherently global, these researchers have not had an opportunity to work together. Both the US and European Union groups understand that there are technical, social and economic issues that require joint exploration and that they must have the opportunity to meet regularly to coordinate research; to share research results; and where possible, to consider the different national, technical, and social expectations about digital libraries.

To meet this challenge for an international Digital Library research agenda, five working groups have been established in key technical areas. These groups will meet twice over a two-year period to foster an international community of Digital Library researchers and will focus on generating joint research agendas. In the last issue (ERCIM News no. 32) the first meetings of the Working Groups on Resource Indexing and Discovery in a Globally Distributed Digital Library, Intellectual Property Rights and Economics and Multilingual Information Access were described. In this number, the working groups on Interoperability and Metadata are presented.

More information on the ERCIM Digital Library initiative is available at http://www.area.pi.cnr.it/ErcimDL/

The home page for the EU-NSF working groups is at http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~jperkins/Grant/home.htm

Please contact:
Costantino Thanos - IEI-CNR, Coordinator of the ERCIM Digital Library Initiative
Tel: +39 50 593492
E-mail: thanos@iei.pi.cnr.it