Projects, initiatives and research centers

To the best of our knowledge this is a list of projects, initiatives and research centers relevant to Digital Libraries. If you think we should add other references, please contact us.

Europe

• DEF - Denmark's Electronic Research Library
  The DEF project is the result of a co-operative effort by the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Research and Ministry of Education. The basis for the project is to be found in the government’s IT-political action plan "The Information Society for all - the Danish model" from 1996. The main objective is to strengthen the basis of the knowledge society’s research library service to Danish researchers, students and companies.
     
• DigiCULT
  European Union IST Support Measure to establish a regular technology watch for cultural and scientific heritage.
    
• Digital Curation Centre
  The Digital Curation Centre, supported by the UK JISC and eScience Core Programme, aims to provide a national focus for research into curation and digital preservation issues and to promote expertise and good practice, both national and international, for the management of all research outputs in digital format. Based on insight from a vibrant research programme that addresses wider issues of data curation, it will develop and offer programmes of outreach and practical services to assist those who must curate data.
      
• Digital Library Forum
  Digital Library Forum's main focus is on the funding activities in Germany and on other information of interest on the subject of the Digital Library.
    
• DINI - Deutsche Initiative für NetzwerkInformation
  DINI aims to support the development of information infrastructures and the cooperation between relevant German institutions. This is done by developing recommendations, standards, requirements for information services and communication networks and by creating netbased digital publication opportunities.
    
• Drawing with Optical Instruments. Devices and Concepts of Visuality an Representation
  This is a cooperation project of the Research Unit A2 of the Collaborative Research Center - SFB 626 of the Freie Universität Berlin, the Library and the IT-Group of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science - MPIWG Berlin, and the ECHO Initiative (European Cultural Heritage Online - Open Access Infrastructure for a Future Web of Culture and Science).
      
• eBank UK
  The project will investigate the issues surrounding provenance and the use and re-use of original data for research and learning purposes, and will result in the development of an eBank UK pilot service for the benefit of the HE and FE communities. The concepts underpinning the pilot bring together both research and learning and teaching activities in an innovative manner and they seek to demonstrate the direct relationship between the two areas, which results in the growth and development of rich knowledge structures.
    
• EBLIDA
  EBLIDA is an independent non-governmental and non-commercial umbrella association of national library, information, documentation and archive associations and organisations in Europe. Subjects on which EBLIDA concentrates are copyright, culture, telematics, Central and Eastern Europe, information society related matters and information technology.
    
• EDLproject
  EDLproject is a Targeted Project funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus Programme, within the area of Cultural content and scientific/scholarly content. The project is working to integrate the bibliographic catalogues and digital collections of the National Libraries of Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain and Sweden, into The European Library.
    
• ePrints UK project
  Funded by JISC-FAIR, the ePrints UK project will be developing subject-based, national services through which the higher and further education community can access the collective output of e-print papers available from compliant Open Archive repositories, particularly those provided by UK universities and colleges. 
   
• TEL - The European Library
  The European Library is a portal which offers access to the combined resources (books, magazines, journals, etc. - both digital and non-digital) of the 45 national libraries of Europe. It offers free searching and delivers digital objects - some free, some priced. Among its projects, TEL-ME-MOR is supporting the 10 national libraries from the New Member States in becoming full members of The European Library, providing unified access to the electronic resources of the main European National Libraries as well as to other library services.
    
• ELAG - European Library Automation Group
  Founded 1979, the Group supports library automation by means of series of conferences and seminars.
         
• IuK - Gemeinsame Initiative der wissenschaftlichen Fachgesellschaften in Deutschland
  German Scientific Societies are cooperating in IuK regarding the development and creation of infrastructures for electronic information and communication.
    
• JISC - The Joint Information Systems Committee
  The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) supports further and higher education by providing strategic guidance, advice and opportunities to use Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to support teaching, learning, research and administration. JISC is funded by all the UK post-16 and higher education funding councils.
     
• LIBER - Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche
  The Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER) is the principal association of the major research libraries of Europe. It was founded in 1971 under the auspices of the Council of Europe. Its current membership includes research libraries of more than thirty countries.
    
• MICHAEL - Multilingual Inventory of Cultural Heritage in Europe
  MICHAEL is a ground-breaking project that aims to open up worldwide access to the European cultural heritage. The project is supported by the European Commission with funding through eTen programme, which is dedicated to the deployment of new technologies in Europe.
   
• MINERVA - Ministerial Network for Valorizing Activities in Digitisation Thematic Network
  MinervaEC is a Thematic Network in the area of cultural, scientific information and scholarly content. The Consortium brings together stakeholders and experts from all over Europe, capitalising the results achieved by the previous Minerva project, and supporting the European Commission initiative “i2010 – A European Information Society for growth and employment” as well as the Dynamic Action Plan launched in Bristol in November 2005 by the European Union Member States.
     
• MOSAICA
  MOSAICA is a research & development project co-financed by the European Commission under the IST Programme in the domain of Cultural Heritage. It proposes a new approach for offering Semantically Enhanced, Multifaceted, Collaborative Access to Cultural Heritage, aiming at creating a colourful and diversified mosaic of cultures, traditions, and legacies that will grow and evolve, enabling varied actors to use technological means to express their national, ethnic and religious identity, values, and legacy.
    
• MultiMatch - Multilingual/Multimedia Access to Cultural Heritage
  On the web, cultural heritage content is everywhere, in traditional environments such as libraries, museums, galleries and audiovisual archives, but also in popular magazines and newspapers, in multiple languages and multiple media. The aim of the MultiMatch project is to enable users to explore and interact with online accessible cultural heritage content, across media types and languages boundaries.
    
• MUSCLE - Multimedia Understanding through Semantics, Computation and Learning
  MUSCLE is an EC-sponsored Network of Excellence that aims at establishing and fostering closer collaboration between research groups in multimedia datamining and machine learning. The Network integrates the expertise of over forty research groups working on image and video processing, speech and text analysis, statistics and machine learning. The goal is to explore the full potential of statistical learning and cross-modal interaction for the (semi-)automatic generation of robust meta-data with high semantic value for multimedia documents.
   
• Semantic Grid and Autonomic Computing Programme (UK)
  Lying at the core of scientific development is the discovery of new knowledge. The rapid increase in the volume and variety of data inherent within e-Science and mirrored by e-Commerce and e-Government means that any supporting infrastructure must provide a set of semantic services. These core services must be able to equip data with meaning and generate a surrounding semantic context in which data can be meaningfully interpreted. Fundamental research on knowledge systems and services is needed to allow us to move from the current data centric view supporting the grid to a semantic grid with a powerful set of knowledge services. Supported by JISC and the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) in the UK.
    
• Vascoda
  Vascoda is a German interdisciplinary Internet portal for the retrieval of scientific information.

USA

• Alexandria Digital Library Project, Univ. of California Santa Barbara
  Includes the Alexandria Digital Library and the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype.
    
• Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE
  Builds digital collections and services while providing information and support to digital library developers worldwide. Sponsored by The Library, UC Berkeley, and Sun Microsystems, Inc.
    
• California Digital Library
  The California Digital Library supports the assembly and creative use of the world's scholarship and knowledge for the University of California libraries and the communities they serve. In addition, the CDL provides tools that support the construction of online information services for research, teaching, and learning, including services that enable the UC libraries to effectively share their materials and provide greater access in digital content.
     
• Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities, Rutgers
  The Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities is dedicated to helping people access and implement research projects using electronic texts.
     
• Center for Human-Information Interaction, Univ. of Washington
  The mission of the Center for Human-Information Interaction is to carry out basic and applied research about human-information interaction in order to guide the design of effective and efficient information systems. Informed by the Cognitive Work Analysis framework, their projects focus on information interaction on the job and embrace the complexity and dynamic nature typical of modern work.
     
• Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst
  The CIIR develops tools that provide effective and efficient access to large, heterogeneous, distributed, text and multimedia databases. Its accomplishments include significant research advances in the areas of distributed information retrieval, information filtering, topic detection, multimedia indexing and retrieval, document image processing, terabyte collections, data mining, summarization, resource discovery, interfaces and visualization, and cross-lingual information retrieval.
     
• CRADL - Center for Research and Development of Digital Libraries, Univ. of North Carolina Chapel Hill
  The Center for Research and Development of Digital Libraries (CRADLE) is a federation of parties interested in the migration, management, and accessibility of digital information. We serve as a test bed for the development of digital libraries, while focusing on the training and education of digital librarians. We act as the incubator and the risk taker, to develop novel methodologies for digital libraries.
     
• Center for the Study of Digital Libraries, Texas A&M
  The Center provides expertise and experience to help transfer collections of all types -- from books and journals to biological specimens and museum pieces -- into useful digital libraries. Center staff includes experts in key new technologies required for digital libraries: electronic document modeling and publication, hyperbase systems, process-based and spatial hypermedia systems, collaborative systems, and computer-human interaction.
     
• CNI - Coalition for Networked Informatio
  CNI is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. Some 200 institutions representing higher education, publishing, network and telecommunications, information technology, and libraries and library organizations make up CNI's Members.
    
• Digital Library Federation
  The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a consortium of libraries and related agencies that are pioneering in the use of electronic-information technologies to extend their collections and services. Through its members, the DLF provides leadership for libraries broadly by a) identifying standards and "best practices" for digital collections and network access, b) coordinating leading-edge research-and-development in libraries' use of electronic-information technology and c) helping start projects and services that libraries need but cannot develop individually.
    
• DLESE - Digital Library for Earth System Educatio
  DLESE is a geoscience community resource that supports teaching and learning about the Earth system. 
   
• Digital Libraries research, Artificial Intelligence Lab, Univ. of Arizona
  It aims at developing techniques to enhance information retrieval and knowledge management of large digital collections. Its work includes portal building initiatives in a wide variety of domains and in multiple languages testing collection building, search, visualization, and analysis techniques.
    
• Digital Libraries Research at Cornell
  Digital libraries research is an interdisciplinary activity within Information Science at Cornell. The work is rooted in the practical problems of large-scale electronic publishing, web information systems, scholarly communication and the long-term preservation of digital information. Our research investigates architecture, protocols, services, and policies that facilitate the creation, management, accessibility, and longevity of distributed information.
    
• Digital Library Research Laboratory, Virginia Tech
  Its work on digital libraries is diverse, including theory, experimentation, and human issues. Its ongoing efforts are with the MARIAN catalog tool, collection visualization, international issues, fundamental DL theory (the 5S model), data mining, applications work with the IBM-DL collection management tool, support of the NDLTD, definition of DLs and digital librarians as human activity systems, dynamic document generation and analysis, caching, flash crowds, and most recently, issues in and applications of PetaPlex terabyte storage.
     
• Informedia Project, Carnegie Mellon University
  The overarching goal of the Informedia initiatives is to achieve machine understanding of video and film media, including all aspects of search, retrieval, visualization and summarization in both contemporaneous and archival content collections.
   
Library digital initiative, Harvard
Harvard University's Library Digital Initiative (LDI) is a comprehensive program begun in 1998 to develop the University's capacity to manage digital information by a) creating the technical infrastructure to support the acquisition, organization, delivery, and archiving of digital library materials, b) providing a team of specialists to advise librarians and others in the University community on key issues in the digital environment, c) providing librarians and staff with experience in a wide range of technologies and digital materials and d) enriching the Harvard University Library collections with a significant set of digital resources.

The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.
 
The Internet Public Library
The Internet Public Library (IPL) is a public service organization and learning/teaching environment at the University of Michigan School of Information.
 
Library of Congress: American Memory
Contains documents, photographs, movies, and sound recordings that tell the United States history.
   
National Science Digital Library
USA's online library of resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education and research.
 
OCLC Research
The Online Computer Library Center is a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world's information and reducing information costs. OCLC Research is one of the world's leading centers devoted exclusively to the challenges facing libraries in a rapidly changing information technology environment.
   
OYEZ
The Oyez Project is an archive of more than 50 years of official recordings made in the United States Supreme Court. Audio is synchronized to transcripts and fully searchable. As of January 2007, the archive contains more than 3000 hours of audio. When complete, it will host more than 9000 hours.
    
The Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University
Perseus is an evolving digital library for the study of the humanities, engineering interactions through time, space, and language.
  
PLoS - Public Library of Science
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS is working with scientists, their societies, funding agencies, and other publishers to pursue our broader goal of ensuring an open-access home for every published article and to develop tools to make the literature useful to scientists and the public.
 
Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project
The goal of this project is to design and implement the infrastructure and services needed for collaboratively creating, disseminating, sharing and managing information in a digital library context.
 
University of Virginia Libraries: Electronic Centers
The University of Virginia Library has established content-oriented centers to which students and faculty and scholars go via the Internet. This web site gives a glimpse into the resources, including The Electronic Text Center and the Geospatial/statistical Information Data Center.
  

Canada

• CIDL - Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries
  An alliance of Canadian libraries whose aim is to promote, co-ordinate and facilitate the development of Canadian digital collections and services in order to optimise national interoperability and long-term access to Canadian digital library resources.

Australia

• DSTC - The Cooperative Research Centre for Distributed Systems Technology
  The DSTC is a joint venture supported by the Australian Government's Cooperative Research Centres Program and over 24 participating organisations developing the technical infrastructure for tomorrow's enterprise. DSTC conducts world class research, develops software, and provides training and professional consulting services.