DELOS Workshop on Emerging Technologies in the Digital Libraries
Domain
by Carol Peters
The objective of the DELOS Working Group, funded by the ESPRIT
Long Term Research Programme, is to promote research into the
further development of digital library technologies. Since 1996,
DELOS has organised Workshops on DL-related research topics (see
this number for a report on the 8th DELOS Workshop on User Interfaces),
has been responsible for initiating a series of European Conferences
on Digital Library Research and Advanced Technology (ECDL’99 will
be held next September in Paris) and has partially financed the
setting up of the ERCIM Technical Reference Digital Library (ETRDL).
In addition, DELOS has sponsored five European-US collaborative
working groups.
A digital library is the integration of multiple components which
do not initially fit together in a seamless fashion for a number
of reasons. Firstly, the necessary components come from a background
of different communities and, secondly, they should enable new
functions which were not under consideration when the individual
single components were first designed and implemented. This means
that the realisation of large-scale globally distributed digital
libraries depends as much on collaborative effort as it does on
the development of new technologies in order to develop systems
which truly integrate their components. A high level of collaboration
is required both across disciplines and across geographical boundaries.
For this reason, DELOS in collaboration with the US National Research
Foundation decided to set up a group of EU-US working groups with
the mandate to jointly explore technical, social and economic
issues and plan common research agendas with respect to a set
of key DL research areas in which international cooperation was
considered to be of particular importance. The Working Groups
addressed the following DL-related research areas:
- interoperability between digital library systems
- metadata
- intellectual property rights and economic issues
- resource indexing and discovery in a globally distributed digital
library
- multilingual information access.
Each group studied the state-of-the-art and current trends in
their area and produced a set of recommendations and priorities
for future R&D activities.
The results of these studies were presented at a Workshop, held
in Brussels on 12 October, 1998, and sponsored by DELOS and by
ERCIM as part of the ERCIM Digital Library Initiative. During
the morning session the European and US Coordinators of the Working
Groups (Costantino Thanos, IEI-CNR, and Dan Atkins, University
of Michigan) described the objectives of the EU-NSF collaboration
and their vision for the future of Digital Libraries to an invited
audience composed mainly of European research coordinators, funding
officials and heads of national research programmes, plus some
representatives from leading industries interested in aspects
of Digital Library research and applications. European and US
leaders of the working groups (Christos Nikolaou, University of
Crete; Carl Lagoze, Cornell University; Hans-Jörg Schek, ETH-Zurich;
Thomas Baker, GMD, Bonn; Judith Klavans, Columbia University,
US) then outlined the main proposals for each area of activity.
The session ended with a summary of the global recommendations
of the groups for the efficient and effective development of the
next generation of digital library systems presented by Peter
Schäuble, ETH-Zurich and Alan Smeaton, City University, Dublin.
In the afternoon, a panel discussion, chaired by Dennis Tsichritzis,
GMD and former president of ERCIM, gave Programme Officers of
the European Commission and the US National Science Foundation
and a representative of the Japanese DL community the opportunity
to present their own opinions and the views of their agencies
with respect to developments in the digital library area and discuss
future scenarios for cooperative actions.
The first results of the joint EU-NSF Working Groups, summarised
as ‘An International Research Agenda for Digital Libraries’, have
been published by ERCIM. Final reports by the five Groups will
be available early 1999. For an on-line version of the summary
report and for further information on the activities of the DELOS
Working Group, see http://www.iei.pi.cnr.it/DELOS/
Please contact:
Costantino Thanos - IEI-CNR
DELOS Coordinator
Tel: +39 050 593 492
E-mail: thanos@iei.pi.cnr.it
