Second European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology
For Digital Libraries
by Christos Nikolaou
The Second European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology
for Digital Libraries (ECDL’98) was held in Heraklion, Crete,
Greece, 21-23 September 1998, and was organised by the Institute
of Computer Science (ICS) of the Foundation for Research and Technology
- Hellas (FORTH) in co-operation with the Department of Computer
Science of the University of Crete. ECDL’98 builds upon the success
of the first of this series of European Conferences on Research
and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, held last year
in Pisa, Italy, September 1-3, 1997.
This series of conferences is partially funded by the TMR Programme
of the European Commission and is actively supported and promoted
by ERCIM. The aim is to bring together the different communities
involved in the development of Digital Libraries, to review progress
and to discuss strategies, research and technological development
(RTD) issues, as well as specific topics related to the European
context. These communities include professionals from universities,
research centres, industry, government agencies, public libraries,
etc. One of the main objectives is to promote and sustain an international
and multi-disciplinary Digital Libraries community, facilitating
scientific and technological progress, enabling growth of the
available infrastructure and services, increasing the dissemination
bandwidth and attracting further interest, particularly from young
scientists.
ECDL’98 was a truly international event of a distinctively interdisciplinary
nature. This year’s conference can be considered as a major success:
participation has tripled since last year with 450 participants
from 45 countries around the world. The international programme
committee of the conference comprised 32 representatives from
13 countries. In total, 107 papers were received, a significant
increase from last year, which were assigned to 56 reviewers.
The significant increase in the number of paper submissions marks
the growing interest that the field of Digital Libraries has attracted
over the past year. Following a rigorous peer review selection
process, where each paper was reviewed by at least three reviewers,
35 full papers were selected. The high quality of the submitted
papers also indicates the rapid progress that is taking place
in this emerging technological field. Additionally, the conference
features 1 keynote speaker, 10 invited talks, 7 tutorials, 32
posters, 6 panel sessions, 2 special sessions, 13 demonstrations,
and 9 DELOS Workshop papers.
A digital library constitutes a quantum quality leap over a simple
electronic collection of books and journals. It is an active super-entity
composed of active or passive information objects that live scattered
around the world and are accessible through the Worldwide Web.
Examples of such information objects are: documents in digital
form together with their readers’annotations and the responses
of their creators; sounds and pictures - moving or still - with
their descriptions and their annotations; programs with their
animation graphics and sample inputs for experimentation; collaboration
environments for research (eg teleguidance of a roaming underwater
autonomous vehicle off the Mediterranean coast and collection
of its measurements to feed a mathematical model for the prediction
of coastal pollution) or entertainment (eg virtual reality games
on the Internet).
The Alexandrian daughter library was established about 235 BC
by Ptolemy III in the Temple of Sarapis, with the ideal of an
international library -incorporating not only all Greek literature
but also translations into Greek from the other languages of the
Mediterranean, the Middle East, and India. The scholars of Alexandria
had immediate access to an enormous collection of works by the
standards of their time. In theory, all these works were accessible
by the scholars even without the library - provided they found
a copy of the work they were searching somewhere in the world,
something practically impossible most of the time.
In a similar way, an abundance of information objects lives, evolves,
grows and dies in the ocean of the World Wide Web. In theory,
humans can seek them through Internet’s search engines, and if
they are lucky enough find them, and interact with them. However,
in reality, this has become increasingly difficult, as the number
of objects and the size of Internet grow geometrically with time.
A digital library acts as an agent for both humans and information
objects in cyberspace. The creators of the information objects
can entrust their creations to the digital library, which safeguards
their authenticity, protects them from plagiarism, and ensures
their promotion and evolution as conceptual artifacts that interact
with others in the world. The digital library informs all entities,
human or otherwise, about the information objects that it supports.
It negotiates and enters into contractual agreements with other
digital libraries for the exchange of access rights to objects.
This drastically new understanding of libraries is expected to
have a dramatic social and economic impact world-wide. Creators’
intellectual property rights, publishers’ commercial rights, the
very nature of publishing, citizens’ access rights, the nature
of the public library and the museum are some of the areas that
are being re-examined and redefined. The enforcement of the access
rights of the citizens of the emerging Information Society becomes
paramount, through access techniques tailored to the individual
capabilities, requirements, skills and preferences of the individual
user.
The conference was an international Forum - not simply European
- where these important issues were discussed among researchers
from multiple disciplines whose science relates to the development
of digital libraries. It provided an opportunity for these scientists
to form a research community in Europe specific to digital library
development; to enable review and discussion of research under
way in Europe, the US, Japan and other countries on digital libraries;
to establish a forum for discussion of issues specific to Europe
such as interoperability, multilinguality, intellectual property
policy, and electronic commerce.
Some of the important presentations and demonstrations at the
Conference were the following:
- Aquarelle, a digital library for cultural material that was built
by a large European consortium with the participation of ERCIM,
museums and publishers
- ERCIM’s multilingual digital library for the Computer Science
Technical Reports
- the second generation of Digital Library architectures, based
on Java and Corba technologies, such as the Aurora architecture
proposed by the Pleiades research group of FORTH and the University
of Crete, or the FEDORA system proposed by a research group at
Cornell University, U.S.A.
- white papers on the research agenda for Digital Libraries, prepared
by the joint efforts of European and American working groups with
support from ESPRIT in Europe and NSF in the United States.
The ECDL’98 Conference Proceedings, edited by Christos Nikolaou
and Constantine Stephanidis, have been published in the Lecture
Notes on Computer Science Series of Springer, LNCS 1513, ISBN
3-540-65101-2.
A special issue of the International Journal on Digital Libraries
(IJODL), entitled ‘In the tradition of Alexandrian Scholars’ will
be dedicated to results of the Conference. The purpose of the
special issue is to offer to the international Digital Libraries
community a collection of the best ECDL’98 Conference results,
while, at the same time providing to the authors of the Conference
Proceedings an opportunity to present a more detailed account
of their work. Following a limited call for ECDL’98 papers and
a new peer review procedure, this IJODL special issue, to be printed
in 1999, will publish papers by authors that have contributed
to the ECDL’98 Conference Proceedings. Guest Editors of the IJODL
special issue are Christos Nikolaou and Constantine Stephanidis.
Please contact:
Christos Nikolaou - ICS-FORTH
Tel: +30 81 39 16 76
E-mail: nikolau@ics.forth.gr
