Collaboration between the United States and Europe in the Field of Digital Library Research

by Carol Peters

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An agreement has been signed between the European Union and the National Science Foundation of the United States for a collaboration in the Digital Library field.

In the context of this collaboration, a series of meetings is being organized between members of the US and European DL research communities. The objective is to provide the opportunity to discuss and explore jointly technical, social and economic issues, plan common research agendas, share research results, and explore national, technical, and social expectations about digital libraries. Five working groups have been set up addressing the areas of interoperability, metadata, intellectual property rights and economic issues, resource indexing and discovery in a globally distributed digital library, and multilingual information access. Each working group includes approximately ten members and is scheduled to meet twice before preparing a final report on the state-of-the-art and recommendations for future directions. Here below, we present brief reports of the first meetings of three of these groups.

The collaboration is funded by the National Science Foundation through the University of Michigan (9605202) and by the European Union through ERCIM.

For further information on this collaboration and the other activities of the ERCIM Digital Library Initiative: http://www.area.pi.cnr.it/ErcimDL/

Please contact:

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