School Program
   
This one-week intensive school will consist of ten half-day sessions that will include lectures, seminars, practical demonstrations, group work and “field trips” to cultural institutions. The morning sessions will usually begin at 9:00 and end at 13:00, with a coffee break during the morning. The afternoon sessions will usually begin at 14:30 and end at 18:00, with a coffee break during the afternoon. Distinguished lecturers from Europe and the United States will be addressing the following topics. 
   
   
Opening Speech
Galileo's Blog - The challenges of the Web
(Paolo Galluzzi, University of Florence and IMSS)
  
  
Introduction to Digital Libraries 
(Vittore Casarosa, ISTI-CNR; Kaye Howe, NSDL)
 
This introductory session describes the journey underway from the world of traditional libraries and their support structures to the digital world where new technologies enable the development of innovative perspectives and facilitation of exciting connections. It will describe how current and emerging digital library technologies are changing the way information is acquired, described, archived, accessed, contextualized, annotated, disseminated, and kept effective through evaluation. The session will also touch on issues of project management in implementing the transition from traditional to digital libraries, including economical aspects and cooperation among cultural institutions.
  
 
Digitizing Information 
(Pat Dixon, Northumbria University)
  
This session will explore the issues related to the digitization of materials and objects, in order to overcome limitations imposed by time, locality, fragility, and ownership. Born digital materials and digital surrogates created through digitization present significant issues of long-term preservation, rights administration and content distribution.
 

Digital Collections 
(Laura Campbell, Library of Congress; Ragnar Nordlie, Oslo University College)
  
This session will describe the transformation in typical library activities from a traditional world to a digital world. Digital collections build on the strengths of traditional libraries in terms of collection development strategies, describing collection scope and the need to manage intellectual property. However, the digital nature of digital collections causes some unique issues in terms of granularity, versioning, maintenance, quality assurance and contextualization. 
  
       
Organizing the Digital Library 
(Donatella Castelli, ISTI-CNR; Dean Krafft, Cornell University)
 
This session will provide an introduction to the basic architectures, models and protocols used in digital library systems and inter-library operability protocols and techniques. Examples will be drawn from a variety of EU and US libraries, to show the basic features of Digital Library Management Systems, such as support for storage of digital content and metadata, versioning, access control and authorization, content management, semi-automatic classification, etc. The session will also cover broader service architectures and interoperating applications for digital libraries, including issues of metadata aggregation, supporting multiple portals and content creation applications within a service framework, and some of the issues in allowing users to directly add to the library content and descriptive information, such as folksonomic tags, annotations, organizational structures, and relationships to other resources. 
  
 
Describing Information 
(Paul Weston, University of Pavia)
  
This session will look at the constant library challenge of describing resources, but will consider how a digital world impacts such descriptions. The digitizing of real objects allows real objects to be presented and organized in new ways (different groupings, different time periods). Similarly, in a world where an object is born or becomes digital, the challenge is determining the extent to which traditional descriptive information is useful, and what might usefully replace or augment it. Both cases raise the need to describe the objects in new ways that go beyond standard existing library formats. The session will also briefly touch also upon more advanced topics such as semantic interoperability, the Semantic Web, and knowledge extraction and representation.
 
   
Distributed Services and Identity Management 
(David Millman, Columbia University)
 
Recent technologies to manage identities across distributed services have an important impact on service planning and architecture. When several distributed applications share identity information they can create an integrated system that uses the best features of each, creates a seamless user experience, and in which new services become possible. Such integrated systems can also offer valuable evaluation metrics. And they raise new policy and privacy questions. Digital library planners should consider more than their own new web site, their repository, or their particular service. They should, from the start, consider the possibilities of collaboration and integration with other projects and services. In this way, each project can focus on its own principal strengths and all will benefit from the resulting synergies. This session will report on current federated identity efforts in the field, on the NSDL federated identity management architecture in particular, and how that experience is informing the design of participating services, collection of evaluation data, and policy discussions.
 
  
Accessing the Repository 
(Carlo Meghini, ISTI-CNR)
  
This section will look at the field of Information Retrieval and will describe technologies and approaches used to support information indexing, query execution and result presentation. Examples will be drawn from EU and US libraries, with specific discussion of indexing models, both for traditional and non-traditional objects (e.g. pictures, 3D objects, videos) and advanced techniques for searching and browsing. 
  
      
Re-thinking the Role of Repositories 
(Sandy Payette, Cornell University)
  
Traditionally we think of repositories in digital libraries as services that store and provide access to content. Over the past several years we have seen the proliferation of institutional repositories that conform to this basic storage model, based on architectures such as DSpace, Fedora, Greenstone and ePrints. However, the web has increasingly evolved into a dynamic, collaborative space populated by blogs, wikis, and other forms of dynamic information. In response, we must reframe the role of repositories and their context within a broader service-oriented architecture that enables integration of traditional text-based context, data, and computational services. This session will review the traditional role of repositories and articulate their new expanded role. It will use examples of applications in the institutional repository and developing world of eScholarship.
  
  
Making the Library work for the User 
(John Akeroyd, University College London; Vittore Casarosa, ISTI-CNR; Andrea Scotti, Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale)
  
This session will explore how a digital library can be not just a source of information, but can become a tool for study, research, work and collaboration in a multilingual environment. It will look at examples of tools and services for personalizing, customizing, inferring information and sharing information, to satisfy the needs expressed by a person (student, teacher, librarian), by industry, by general public, or by an entity (other digital library or digital service). The session will include also tools and techniques for examining usability, issues surrounding metrics, and case studies examining effort to gauge impact on users of various types.
  
  
Evaluation of Digital Libraries 
(Anna Maria Tammaro, University of Parma; Mary Marlino, Digital Learning Science)
 
The session on Evaluation will provide participants with a methodological framework with which to consider user needs, expectations and perceptions, and further develop their critical ability to evaluate service quality and plan digital library programmes.
  
 
Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century 
(Carl Lagoze, Cornell University)
  
The nature of scholarship in all disciplines is changing. Enabled by increasingly powerful computers, high-speed networks, and peta-scale storage it is becoming increasingly dynamic, collaborative, data-centric, and process oriented. The artifacts of scholarship are increasingly complex combining text, images, video, data, and computational simulations. To date we have seen a number of responses to these changes including institutional and disciplinary repositories, the “Open access” movement, and protocols such as OAI-PMH that allow federation of content across the Internet. Yet these efforts so far represent changes in form rather than nature. We now have the technologies that make it possible to create a scholarly communication system that closely resembles, and is intertwined with, the scholarly endeavor itself, rather than being an afterthought or annex. This session will look at this changing context and the opportunities it affords. It will begin by reviewing new scholarly communication mechanisms that exist now, including arXiv, PLOS, and institutional repositories. It will then describe state-of-the art developments including the eSciDoc project at the Max Planck Society, the DART project in Australia, and the OAI Object Reuse and Exchange initiative.
  
 
Final session: the (near) future
  
In this final session each work group into which the participants had been divided will present a “project” outlining their ideal Digital Library of the future, based on the concepts acquired during the school.
 
  
Field trips
 
The school programme includes also a visit to two cultural institutions in Florence with significative digital collections, where the school participants will have the opportunity to experiment with those digital libraries and to listen to the experience of those institutions in setting them up.