Newsletter Issue 3

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Latest News from DELOS

Each issue of the Newsletter will carry the most recent news items from the DELOS website.

• DELOS Welcomes Proposal to Create European Digital Library
    
• Presentations Available from Joint Workshop on Electronic Publishing
   
• DELOS Digital Repositories: Heraklion Workshop Presentations Now Available
    
• Programme Overview for ECDL2005 Reveals Topics for the Conference

A recent letter of proposal to create a European Digital Library has been welcomed by the DELOS Network of Excellence. The letter to the current European Council and Commission presidents from the French, Italian, Spanish, German, Polish and Hungarian heads of state proposes making works held in European libraries available online in a European digital library. Giving his reaction to the proposal, Costantino Thanos, scientific coordinator of the Network, remarked, "That all citizens, anywhere, anytime, should have access to Internet-connected digital devices to search all of human knowledge, regardless of barriers of time, place, culture or language has been the vision of DELOS since its inception. DELOS believes that, in the near future, networked virtual libraries will enable anyone from their home, school or office to access the knowledge contained in the digital collections created by traditional libraries, museums, archives, universities, governmental agencies, specialised organizations, and individuals around the world.”

Costantino went on to elaborate on the potential of the next-generation digital libraries DELOS has in its sights: “These new libraries will offer digital versions of traditional library, museum and archive holdings including text, video, sound and images, 2D and 3D objects. But they will also provide powerful new technological capabilities that enable users to refine their requests, analyse the results, access collections in other languages, share resources, and work collaboratively. No matter where the digital information resides physically, sophisticated search software can find it and present it to the user on demand. A European Digital Library is a step towards making this vision a reality.”

A reminder to delegates and all readers that the presentations given by speakers at the Joint Workshop on Electronic Publishing organised by DELOS, SVEP and ScieCom at Lund University in April 2005 are now available. They can be accessed via the Workshop Programme page. With some 90 participants mostly from Scandanavia but also from Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and beyond, the workshop covered a number of themes including Integrating Advanced Features into Institutional Repository Platforms, e-Journal Publication Software, e-Publishing Policies, Author Support and Long-term Access and Preservation.

Panorama of Heraklion, Crete. (Photo courtesy of Martin Doerr, FORTH)

The 9th DELOS Network of Excellence thematic workshop on Digital Repositories: Interoperability and Common Services took place over 11-13 May, 2005 in Heraklion on the Greek island of Crete. This workshop was organised jointly by the Semantic Interoperability (KESI) and Preservation (PRESERV) clusters of the DELOS Project and sought to provide different communities with the opportunity to learn about the latest research developments in this field.

We have received a report on the workshop from Rachel Heery and presentations and papers are available from the workshop website available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/delos-rep-workshop/

It is now possible to see the tutorials, papers and posters envisaged for the European Conference on Digital Libraries to be held in Vienna over 18-23 September 2005 and organised by TU Wien.

The whole conference is prefaced by a series of tutorials which this year will be concentrating on an Overview and Formal Framework of Digital Libraries, Context-enhanced Digital Library Services, Thesauri and Ontologies in Digital Libraries and Building Digital Library Collections with Greenstone.

The main body of the conference takes place over 19-21 September and offers delegates, in addition to keynote speeches and panels, two tracks to choose from on each day. Over the 3 main days this means some 20 papers per track will be available to each delegate attending the whole programme. Consequently delegates need to choose between competing themes:

• Digital Library Models and Architectures - or - Multimedia Digital Libraries
• XML - or - Building Digital Libraries
• User Studies (1) - or - Digital Preservation
• User Studies (2) - or - Metadata
• Digital Libraries and e-Learning - or - Text Classification in Digital Libraries
• Searching - or - Text Digital Libraries

On the first day of the main conference delegates are invited to attend two panel sessions. The first will consider Does eScience need digital libraries? and will promote discussion on the role that digital libraries can and should play in the emerging eScience computational infrastructure. The panel will explore how the eScience and digital libraries research communities might work together to support the conduct of eScience and move towards a shared research agenda. The second will consider the question Digital Libraries over the GRID: Heaven or Hell? There has been considerable attention given to computation in the Grid environment and yet the literature offers a good deal less on information and service management of the kind required by digital libraries. Consequently the aims of this second panel are to identify the opportunities and problems that derive from the development of the Grid and examine whether its benefits outweigh the disadvantages.

There will be a series of workshops on a range of themes including Digital Libraries in Health Care, Knowledge Extraction and Deployment for Digital Libraries and Repositories, Web Archiving and Digital Preservation, Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) as well as the NKOS Workshop on Mapping Knowledge Organisation Systems. The workshops will begin directly after the close of the main conference.

Added to which the conference will be offering delegates the opportunity to view in excess of 40 posters and demonstrations at time of writing. These will range from overviews of projects and software to directions and outcomes of research activity in areas across the board from metadata, ontologies, thesauri, models, policy and issues such as digital preservation to impact evaluation, cost estimation and beyond.