Newsletter Issue 5

Editorial | ECDL 2005 | DELOS Award Winner | Other Autumn Research Exchanges | European Digital Library: Catalyst for Great Change | DELOS Clusters to Contribute to a Joint Prototype | Support for Library Education in Digital Resources | TEL and DELOS Confer on Common Interests

TEL and DELOS Confer on Common Interests

At the beginning of February this year representatives from The European Library (TEL) and the DELOS Network of Excellence met at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris to discuss areas of common interest with regard to the future development of The European Library. The approach to these discussions was overwhelmingly from a technological standpoint and a number of quite technical presentations and demonstrations were given over the course of 1 -2 February 2006.

The first day focused on the demonstration of Digital Library functionality developed by DELOS partners. For example Pasquale Pagano of ISTI-CNR gave a presentation on the OpenDLib Digital Library covering a series of issues including system requirements, architecture, document handling and overall functionality.

Klaus-Peter Klas of Duisburg University spoke on DAFFODIL and Strategic Support for User-Oriented Access to Heterogeneous Digital Libraries covering aspects such as searching with the DAFFODIL system, its personal library, active tools and the strategic support that it offers to less expert searchers in order to render their searching more effective and allow them to apply more complex search strategies in a user-friendly fashion.

The aims of the SOMLib-based Interfaces to Digital Libraries were not dissimilar in their attempt to provide support for intuitive browsing of document collections and this item was followed by five more presentations entitled Eurovision: a text-based cross-language image retrieval system, Integration of services - Integration of Standards, Content based retrieval of images and 3D models, Annotation in Digital Libraries and Linking Paper and Digital.

It was also particularly pleasing to see many representatives from MICHAEL in the audience for this first day.

The second day of this collaborative event was designed to engender discussion of wider technological issues as well as providing an opportunity for delegates to consider specific topics for closer co-operation.

It began with further presentations on evaluation plans for The European Library, search engines, DL architectures, DL services, annotation and personalization, multilinguality, metadata registries and finally user interfaces.

Jill Cousins of The European Library Office facilitated the selection of topics for further discussion which led to a series of discussion groups on action plans for the future terminating in a plenary session where groups were able to report back on the outcomes of their discussion. Jill then rounded off the event by highlighting the next steps on from this review.

Slides from these two days are available here. 

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