ERCIM News No.25 - April 1996
DELOS Kick-off Meeting on Digital Libraries
by Carol Peters
The first meeting of DELOS was hosted by INRIA
at Sophia Antipolis, 4-6 March 1996. DELOS is a working group funded by
the IT Long Term Research programme (LTR) of the European Commission to
study and in-vestigate the most significant research issues in the digital
library area.
The DELOS working group is just one of a series of ERCIM-sponsored initiatives
aimed at promoting research and operational activities in the Digital
Library field.
The main objectives of DELOS are:
- to stimulate research activities in areas which are relevant for the
efficient and cost-effective development of digital libraries
- to encourage collaboration between the research teams of the DELOS
consortium
- to establish links with on-going projects and activities in the field
of digital libraries in industry and other public and private institutions.
With the exception of ELSEVIER and the University of Michigan, the DELOS
consortium is constituted by teams belonging ERCIM member institutes.
The workshop was attended by 45 partici-pants. In addition to the invited
speakers and members of the DELOS consortium, a number of representatives
from industry and the user community were also invited to participate in
the meeting and contri-bute to the discussions. As this was the kick-off
meeting, it was decided to present an overview of on-going research in the
digital library field, focusing particularly on the activities and experiences
of US projects already under way. The first day was therefore dedicated
to technical presentations of key North American DL projects.
The first speaker was Clifford Lynch, Director of Library Automation of
the University of California who described current efforts in the US to
move towards operational digital libraries. He discussed the evolving view
of the digital library and its relationship to traditional libraries on
the one hand and networked information services on the other.
Next Bill Birmingham, chief technical architect of the Michigan Digital
Library Project (UMDL), gave an overview of the Michigan project with particular
emphasis on their vision of digital libraries and the software systems needed
to realize this vision. UMDL sees digital libraries as heterogeneous systems
populated by a vast number of software agents representing information goods
and services. These agents collaborate to perform tasks, forming an "engineered"
economy.
The third speaker was Andreas Paepcke of the Stanford University Integrated
Digital Library Project. Work at Stanford is based on the premise that digital
libraries will not just be online catalogs and collections, but will be
made up of geographically wide-spread services that support users in their
tasks. The Stanford project is comprised of five thrusts which each contribute
to this vision: Digital library infrastructure, user interfaces, economic
issues, software agents and information retrieval technologies. Technologies
supporting interoperability among collections and services are being developed.
The last US speaker was Carl Lagoze of Cornell University, the co-architect
of the Networked Computer Science Technical Reports Library (NCSTRL). He
reviewed the current NCSTRL technology and its origins, described the future
technical direction of the project, and discussed some of the policy issues
and mechanisms for exploring them. NCSTRL makes available technical reports
from over 35 computer science departments and laboratories in North America
and Europe. This collection is expected to grow with the endorsement of
the Computing Research Association (CRA) in the US. and the participation
of ERCIM in Europe with the SAMOS project. The NCSTRL collection provides
a framework for experimentation and demonstration of developing digital
library technology. and provides an opportunity for exploration of the complex
policy issues in developing and managing a federated digital library.
Invited US speakers at the DELOS kick-off meeting: from left to right:
Carl Lagoze, Andreas Paepckeand, Bill Birmingham and Clifford Lynch
On the second day, the members of the DELOS consortium gave presentations
on DL-related research activities under way in their organisations. It was
clear that considerable research efforts are already under way in ERCIM
institutes on activities which are relevant for the efficient and cost-effective
development of digital library systems. Topics covered ranged from DL architectures,
multi-lingual and multimedia information retrieval to economic models and
payment schemes. From the general discussions throughout the two day workshop
between the US and European participants a set of key research issues emerged;
these regarded both technical questions and economic, social and legal problems.
Particularly relevant topics on which future activities could be concentrated
were identified and included interoperability and metadata, multilingual
access and retrieval, intellectual property rights, economic models and
charging systems.
The proceedings in the form of extended abstracts of the presentations will
be available shortly. Subsequent DELOS Workshops will focus on some of the
topics identified at the kick-off meeting. In these workshops attention
will be paid to establishing relationships with industrial and non-ERCIM
institutions interested in the particular area. The idea is not to limit
these meetings to the exchange of ideas and experiences but also to prepare
the ground for the definition of new joint activities in the field. The
next DELOS Workshop will be on Metadata and Interoperability and will be
organised by Tom Baker, GMD, in autumn `96. A Call for Contributions will
be issued soon and will be publicised on the ERCIM Web.
Please contact the Coordinator of the DELOS Working Group and the
ERCIM Digital Library Initiative:
Costantino Thanos - IEI-CNR
Tel: +39 50 593492
E-mail: thanos@iei.pi.cnr.it
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