News Archive

Registration open for Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2005
Digital Libraries: Cyberinfrastructure for Research and Education

The Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (June 7-11, 2005, Denver, Colorado, USA) is a major international forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues.

The theme of JCDL2005 highlights the powerful role of digital libraries as cyberinfrastructure. This cyberinfrastructure has the potential to engender the creation of powerful new tools, research methodologies, and processes that will enable scientists and learners to investigate the natural world, the social world, and the human-built environment in new and previously unimaginable ways. As global interests in computation, information management, networking, and intelligent sensing converge, the conduct of research and education will be transformed.

Registration is now open at the conference website.

For any other information contact by email the organizing committee.

DELOS Summer School 2005: Digital Preservation for Digital Libraries
5-11 June 2005, Sophia Antipolis, France

The DELOS Network of Excellence is a four-year project funded by the European Commission under the Sixth Framework Programme to synergize and foster technology for the next-generation of Digital Libraries. It builds on the work of an earlier project under FP5, which ran from 2000-2003. At its Scientific Board Meeting of July 2004 in Corvara it was agreed that DELOS should run a summer school on 'Digital Preservation in Digital Libraries'. The DELOS Network of Excellence is pleased to announce that the summer school programme has been developed and is now available for registration. This delivery of this event is co-sponsored by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and ERPANET.

The aim of the summer school is to assist participants in understanding how to address digital preservation challenges in the context of the digital library. The workshop will also provide a networking opportunity for participants to meet with other students and researchers, international experts, and practitioners across disciplinary and national boundaries.

For further information and registration details visit the summer school website.

English version of the Laboratory on Digital Libraries & Electronic Publishing website now available
From now on, you can also find the website of the Laboratory on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing of the Department of Archive and Library Sciences, Ionian University in English (http://dlib.ionio.gr/en), in addition to the one in Greek (http://dlib.ionio.gr).

Workshop on New Technologies for Personalized Information Access Call for Papers
Workshop on New Technologies for Personalized Information Access at User Modeling 2005
July 25, 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Information access is one of the hottest topics of information society and it has become even more important since the advent of the Web. On one side, our society relies more and more on information, both for professional and personal goals. Information is nowadays considered as one of the most valuable and strategic goods: knowing the right information, at the right moment, as soon as it is available is a "must" for all of us. On the other side, the amount of available information, especially on the Web and in modern Digital Libraries, is tremendously increasing over time.

In this context, the importance and role of user modeling and personalized information access are increasing. Equipped with user modeling tools capable of comprehending specific user information needs, new retrieval tools will be able to effectively filter out irrelevant information, to rank information in the most suitable way, to compare the contents of different documents, to personalize information presentation, and to adequately tailor
man-machine interaction.

The goals of the workshop are to intensify the exchange of innovative ideas between the different research communities involved, to provide an overview of current activities in the area of personalized information access, and to point out connections between them. The workshop focuses especially on researchers that are working on ontologies, computational linguistics, user modeling and profiling, user adaptive interfaces, digital libraries, and their combination.

The workshop invites paper submission on a range of innovative technologies for personalized information access. The list of relevant topics includes, but is not limited to:

Submissions
Submissions are accepted electronically in PDF format. When preparing your submission, please, follow the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format of Springer-Verlag that is also used by the main User Modeling conference. All submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee on the basis of relevance, originality, significance, soundness and clarity.

Workshop Format
The workshop is planned as a full day workshop with about 10 talks. For each talk 30 to 40 minutes will be allotted with at least 10 minutes for discussion. The proceedings will be published by the UM'2005 Organizing
Committee and also will be available on the workshop Web site.

Important Dates

Libraries Without Walls 6 Announcement and Call for Papers
Libraries Without Walls 6: Evaluating the Distributed Delivery of Library Services
Organised by CERLIM (The Centre for Research in Library and Information Management)
16 - 20 September 2005, Molyvos, Lesvos, Greece

From their beginnings in 1995, the Libraries without Walls conferences have mapped a major change in the practice of librarianship. While library services are still concerned to provide users with physical access to their buildings, electronic access, often from remote locations, is becoming ever more dominant. Papers presented at previous LWW conferences have mapped this change and provided examples of how libraries are pushing out the frontiers of their services.

In 2005 we intend to take a different approach. We want to ask the question, ‘how do we know whether these new services are having a positive impact on our users?’. We are therefore inviting papers on the following themes:

As in the past these themes are indicative and we remain open to proposals which, while in the general area of interest of the conference, do not fit neatly into the defined themes. In addition to research papers, we welcome papers based on truly innovative practice, and proposals for workshops can be made.

All papers will be considered by a panel of independent referees. Papers will be published by Facet Publishing in the LWW Conference Proceedings series.

Presentations at the conference can either be papers of 30 minutes duration or Workshops of 60 minutes. To be considered please submit an abstract (between 400 and 800 words) together with a 50 word biographical statement and a 50 word synopsis of the paper. Please send submissions, preferably by email (as text rather than an attachment), to the address below by 3rd March 2005. Applicants will be informed whether their submissions have been selected during April 2005.

Cost GBP 450 (including accommodation for four nights) Please note that, as the conference does not aim to make a profit, we are unable to offer discounted conference rates to presenters.

For further information please visit the conference website.

ECDL 2005 is the 9th conference in the series of European Digital Library conferences. ECDL has become the major European conference on digital libraries, and associated technical, practical, and social issues, bringing together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field. ECDL 2005 is jointly organized by the Vienna University of Technology (VUT), the Austrian National Library (ÖNB), and the Austrian Computer Society (OCG). The conference will take place in the Vienna Technical University.

Important dates:

Topics:
Topics of contributions include (but are not limited to):

Submissions:
Submissions are invited for full or short papers, posters, demonstrations, panels, tutorials and workshops. All contributions will be reviewed by members of the programm comitee. The proceedings of the conference will be published by Springer in the series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, in hard copy and electronic form. The full text of papers is required at initial submission stage. Papers must be submitted electronically via the submission web page. It is expected that accepted papers are presented by an/the author at the conference. Details of the submission guidelines will be published on the conference website.

IFLA Satellite Congress on Measurement and Standards Call for Papers
Measures and Standards in the Electronic Environment
Open Program sponsored jointly by the IFLA sections for Information Technology, for Statistics and Evaluation, and for University and Research Libraries, 71st IFLA Conference,
14-18 August 2005, Oslo, Norway

How do we obtain meaningful library measures in the electronic age? What standards should we apply? Are Library Management Systems providing meaningful usage information?

This is the first call for papers on the identification and standardisation of measurement of library information in all types of libraries. Papers may be in English, French, German, Russian or Spanish, and should be no more than 20 minutes in duration. Proposals for papers (giving title and abstract) should be submitted to Sue McKnight (IFLA University and Research Libraries Section), Michael Heaney (IFLA Statistics and Evaluation Section) or Maria Inês Cordeiro (IFLA IT section) by 12 February 2005. Successful proposers will be notified by 19 February 2005 and must supply the full text of papers by 1 April.

You may visit the congress website for further details of the congress, including conference fees, accommodation and travel.

CoLIS 5 Announcement
CoLIS 5
4-9 June 2005, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK.
The theme for CoLIS 5 will be the nature, impact and role of context within information-centred disciplines. Context is a complex, dynamic, and multi-dimensional concept that influences both humans and machines: how they behave individually and how they interact with each other. In CoLIS 5 we will take an interdisciplinary approach to the issue of context to help us understand define the theoretical approaches to modelling and understanding context, to incorporate contextual reasoning within technology and to develop a shared framework for promoting the exploration of context. CoLIS 5 welcomes empirical, theoretical and technical contributions in the broad areas of Computer Science, Library Science, and Information Science. Below, there is a list of the major areas of interest. All contributions should explicitly relate the research presented to the specific conference interest of defining and understand the nature and role of context.

Important Dates

Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA) Announcement and Call for Participation
Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA) 2005
30 May - 3 June 2005, Dubrovnik and Mljet, Croatia
The aim of the annual conference and course Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA), which started in 2000, is to address the changing and challenging environment for libraries and information systems and services in the digital world, with an emphasis on current problems, advances and solutions. Each year a different ‘hot’ theme is addressed, divided in two parts: the first part covers research and development and the second addresses advances in applications and practice. LIDA seeks to bring together researchers, practitioners, and developers in a forum for personal exchanges, discussions, and learning, enhanced by being held in memorable locations.
Submissions should be in electronic form (as attachments to email) to Prof. Tatjana Aparac. Inquires can also be addressed to the co-chair of the conference Prof. Tefko Saracevic and Program Chair for Part I. Prof. Christine Borgman. All submissions will be refereed.

Themes LIDA 2004:

I. What can digital libraries do that traditional cannot? Or do in addition?
II. Building a small digital library and digital library network.

Types of contributions:
Invited are the following types of contributions:

Deadlines:

More information on the conference website.

DELOS Workshop on the evaluation of Digital Libraries presentations now available
Visit the DELOS Workshop on the Evaluation of Digital Libraries web page to find the presentations of the workshop in Adobe PDF format.

INEX Workshop Announcement
6-8 December 2004, Schloss Dagstuhl Conference Center, Octavieallee, Wadern, Germany
The final programme of the 2004 INEX Workshop now ready. You can downloaded in PDF format. More information on the INEX website. Also in PDF format you can download the workshop pre proceedings.

DELOS Workshop on the Evaluation of Digital Libraries Announcement
A new website about the forthcoming DELOS Workshop on the Evaluation of Digital Libraries that is going to be held at the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Italy on October 4-5, 2004 has launched.

CLEF 2004 Announcement
The CLEF 2004 Workshop will be held from 15-17 September in Bath, UK, immediately following the 8th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2004). The first session will begin on Wednesday 15 September at 14:30. The final session is scheduled to conclude at 17:00 on Friday 17 September. The aim of the Workshop will be to present and discuss the results of the CLEF 2004 evaluation campaign. Attendance at the Workshop is closed and mostly restricted to participants in CLEF evaluation campaigns. Anyone else wishing to attend should first contact Carol Peters. A preliminary programme is also available, but a more detailed workshop programme will be posted in August.
The Workshop is sponsored by the DELOS Network of Excellence and the European Language Resources Association.

DELOS Information Day at ECDL 2004, Bath, UK.
The DELOS Information Day at ECDL 2004 is at September 15, 2004 and is a unique opportunity to get a comprehensive overview of all the DELOS activities. Participation is free and does not require prior registration. The exact program, as well as other useful information can be found at the relative webpage of the official website.

eValued Toolikt has launched
The eValued Toolkit was launched last month at the eValued conference. This is a set of resources designed to assist academic libraries to evaluate their electronic information services (EIS).
The toolkit has four main sections:

- How to evaluate EIS. It provides information about the evaluation process with step-by-step guide to all elements of the evaluation process including planning and conducting an evaluation and making effective use of your evaluation findings.
- EIS evaluation themes. Information and tips to help you evaluate particular themes relating to EIS e.g. impact on learning, teaching and research, user support, outcomes assessment and access. This section allows you to go straight to tools related to a specific theme
- Tools archive. Arange of tools e.g. questionnaires, interview questions, checklists and statistics for each evaluation theme.
- Custom tools. This allows you to create your own tools based on the standard resources provided in the toolkit.

Any comments or suggestions for further developments would be very welcome (there is an online feedback form).

The next stage of the project will be a piloting and training phase. If you would like to know more about either of these, please contact Sarah McNicol.

Find more information about the papers which were given at eValued conference in June.

The toolkit has been developed by a research team from evidence base research and evaluation services, based in Library Services at the University of Central England. The development has been funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) through its Fund for Good Management Practice.

4th IWAW announcement
4th International Web Archiving Workshop
16 September 2004, Bath, UK

The 4th IWAW will take place in Bath, UK, September 16th 2004, in conjunction with ECDL 2004. The 4th IWAW follows the successful first three International Workshops on Web Archiving (2001 in Darmstadt, Germany, 2002 in Rome, Italy and 2003 in Trondheim, Norway) and will provide a cross domain overview on active research and practice in the emergent domain of web archiving and studies on effective usage of this type of archives.

It is also intended to provide a forum for interaction among librarians, archivists, academic and industrial researchers interested in establishing effective methods and developing improved solutions for Web archiving, maintaining the material accessible.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Case studies
- Data acquisition
- Storage Models and Architecture
- Digital Preservation
- Access
- Policy and Social Issues

More details at the workshop website.

3rd ISDL announcement
3rd DELOS International Summer School on Digital Library Technologies (ISDL 2004)
6-10 September 2004, Pisa, Italy

Introduction
The DELOS Network of Excellence is pleased to announce its Third International Summer School on Digital Library Technologies (ISDL 2004) to be held in Pisa, Italy, on September 6-10, 2004. This edition of the School will focus on "User-Centred Design of Digital Libraries". In particular, it will analyze a broad set of requirements for Digital Library systems coming from various user environments (libraries, museums, and archives) and will discuss the state of the art in several user-related themes such as user interfaces, information visualisation, and personalisation & recommendation.

The Directors of the School are Tiziana Catarci (Universita' di Roma "La Sapienza") and Yannis Ioannidis (University of Athens). The lecturers are leading researchers and practitioners with extensive experience in the topics above. The School will open with an introductory lecture on Digital Libraries and the problems of user interfaces.

The DELOS Network of Excellence is an initiative funded by the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission, within the Work Programme of the Information Society Technologies (please visit the web site www.delos.info for further information about DELOS).

Aims and Objectives
The main purpose of the DELOS Summer School is to foster research in and understanding of the fundamental technologies underlying the Digital Libraries field. It is directed towards graduate students and young researchers and professionals involved in R&D in DL-related areas. Ideally, the participants should represent both the computer science community and the user communities interested in Digital Libraries. Representatives of industrial communities (electronic publishing, broadcasting, software industry, etc.) could also benefit from a participation in the School.

The main theme of this edition of the School is "User-Centred Design of Digital Libraries" and will include lectures on the following topics: functional and non-functional user requirements from the perspective of library users, museum users, archive users; user interface design and evaluation; digital library information visualisation; personalisation of user-system interaction and information retrieval.

No particular qualifications or prerequisites are necessary. However, we recommend that participants have basic experience in using some form of information management systems, such as digital library environments, database systems, information retrieval tools, etc.

Course Programme
The one-week intensive course will consist of nine half-day lectures and one half-day dedicated to BOF (Birds of a Feather) sessions, i.e., discussions in smaller groups on specific topics of common interest, with the participation of the lecturers. The morning half-day lectures will begin at 9:00 and end at 12:30, with a coffee break at 10:30. The afternoon lectures will begin at 14:00 and end at 17:30, with a coffee break at 15:30. The preliminary programme for the School is shown below:

Monday, 6 September 2004

Tuesday, 7 September 2004

Wednesday, 8 September 2004

Thursday, 9 September 2004

Friday, 10 September 2004

Accommodation and Venue
The School will be held in Pisa in the beautiful Conference Centre of Santa Croce in Fossabanda, an ancient monastery dating from the 14th century recently renovated, fifteen minutes walking distance from the center of the city.

Students and lecturers are expected to reside in the Conference Centre for the duration of the School, giving students ample opportunities to know each other and to exchange ideas among themselves and with the lecturers, who are expected to stay for most of the duration of the School. Registration and accommodation information can be found at the DELOS web site, in the list of events.

12th NCID announcement
12th Nordic Conference on Information and Documentation
Aalborg, Denmark, 1-3 September 2004

The 12th is organized by the Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark. The theme of the conference is Knowledge and Change. The global knowledge economy has been associated with high complexity and rapid and discontinuous change. Knowledge can be seen as the primary driver of change as well as a necessity in a turbulent environment. This provides good reasons for information professionals to focus on the various links between Knowledge and Change. The mission of this main conference theme is to accentuate a number of essential and timely academic and professional issues in our field: How should knowledge be organised to foster innovative change? How do organisations utilise internal knowledge resources so as to facilitate creativity and competitiveness? How can information professionals contribute to organisational learning? The purpose of the conference is to highlight such and similar vital questions.

More details at the conference website.

DELOS Workshop on the Evaluation of Digital Libraries
University of Padova, Italy, October 4-5, 2004
(co-located with the DIALOGUES conference)
Digital libraries are destined to become an essential part of the information infrastructure in the 21st century. Given the rapid development in this field, there is an increasing need for evaluations in order to determine the usefulness, usability and economics of digital libraries. However, there is a lack of appropriate evaluation methodologies. This workshop will target at a survey on the state of the art in DL evaluation, and will identify major issues for further research in the area of DL evaluation.
More details, as well as a tentative program, are available at the events section.

DELOS Newsletter publishes first issue
The first official Delos Newsletter has been published. According to the editorial message "the role of the Newsletter is to provide members of the DELOS Network of Excellence with a channel for communicating to each other and the wider digital library community with news and information about their work". You can read the Newsletter in two different formats, html and pdf.

New DELOS website launches
The new central Delos website is launched and can be visited through its new URL:

http://www.delos.info

Currently the site is under development, but contains enough information to be published. The developers expect contributions from all Delos partners, in order to make the website more complete and valuable, especially in the News, Events and Digital Library resources sections.
The developers of Delos prepare a special template for the better handling of News. Another new feature is the combination of RSS News feeds, in the News section. The developing team aims at delivering all Delos News as a RSS news feed, which can be integrated in other websites and news-services. Finally a new Delos logo and an improved design for the site are under development.
The central Delos site can be reached by clicking the logo on the upper right part of this site’s screen.

INEX 2004
Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval
April 2004 - December 2004
Call for participation
The DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries invites participation in an evaluation initiative for XML document retrieval.
The widespread use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML), especially the increasing use of XML in scientific data repositories, Digital Libraries and on the Web, brought about an explosion in the development of XML tools, including systems to store and access XML content. The aim of such retrieval systems is to exploit the logical structure of documents, which is explicitly represented by the XML markup, and retrieve document components, instead of whole documents, in response to a user query. Implementing this, more focused, retrieval paradigm means that an XML retrieval system needs not only to find relevant information in the XML documents, but also determine the appropriate level of granularity to return to the user. In addition, the relevance of a retrieved component is dependent on meeting both content and structural conditions.

7th ICADL announcement
7th International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries: "International Collaboration and Cross-Fertilization"
Call for papers
After its six-year's efficient exploration in offering a forum to promote and share the latest development of technology of digital library, the International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL) has turned out to be a grand annual event in the library and IT communities in Asia and the world as well. The 7th ICADL Conference in 2004 will be hosted by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Shanghai Library in Shanghai, China from December 13 to 17. The theme of this conference is: "Digital Libraries - International Collaboration and Cross-Fertilization". Papers are solicited in a wide variety of digital library related areas, including (but not limited to):

Service and Management
·New forms and models of DL services;
·Digital library performance, resources, usefulness, usability and evaluation;
·User studies: user communities, user needs, user behavior, usage pattern;
·Social, legal and economic issues related DL, such as privacy, intelligence property, information security, sustainability;
·Knowledge management and its application in DL;
·New institution roles and responsibilities of DL in 21st century.
·Live reference service
·Personalization service

Collaboration and Localization
·Case studies on successful national, cross-regional and international DL collaboration projects and impact in Asia-Pacific Region;
·Preserving, organizing and disseminating Asian unique and indigenous knowledge and culture;
·Novel methods and tools for Asian languages information processing.
·Exploring a Cross-Culture Context for DL studies in Asia, social impacts of DL in Asia.

Technology
·Digital library system: architectures, interoperability, mobile applications, agents related to DL;
·Access to distributed and heterogeneous digital collections: interoperability, scalability, relevant information discovery, meta-information integration, Mass storage;
·Information retrieval and data mining: novel IR technologies of text and multimedia, data mining; multi- and cross-lingual data access and searching, machine translation and machine learning;
·Information organization and content management: metadata and OAI, ontologies and semantic web, topic maps;
·Human-computer interaction: interfaces, visualization, portals, personalization;
·Technical standards, protocol in DL area and implication strategies;
·Grid technologies and digital libraries
·E-publication

Important Dates:
Submission of Abstracts (full papers only) June 10, 2004
Submission of Full Papers July 1, 2004
Submission of Short Papers July 1, 2004
Papers should be written in English and submitted in electronic format. More details will be released dynamically at the 7th ICADL Conference's website.

SPIRE 2004 announcement
Eleventh Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval
SPIRE is a concerted series of conferences and satellite meetings fostering exchange and integration in the modeling, design and implementation of advanced tools for the representation, encoding, storage, search, retrieval and discovery of information and knowledge.
Papers are solicited representing original contribution to the areas of the Symposium, which includes: string pattern searching, matching and discovery; data compression; text and data mining; machine learning; tasks, methods, algorithms, media, and evaluation in information retrieval; digital libraries; applications to and interactions with domains such as genome analysis, speech and natural language processing, web links and communities, multilingual data.

The important days for this symposium are the following:
Submission date: May 22, 2004
Acceptance date: June 30, 2004
Final form date: July 20, 2004
For more information visit Symposium's website.

ECDL announcement
8th European Conference on Digital Libraries
12-17 September 2004, University of Bath, UK.

ECDL 2004 welcomes contributions from the international community of scholars, researchers, practitioners and policy makers working across the range of disciplines related to the development of digital libraries. Relevant topics include:

- Human resources, economics, business models
- Digital libraries and learning
- Digital libraries and Research Grids / eScience
- Infrastructures and middleware
- Semantic Web technologies
- Agent technologies
- Users of digital libraries
- Personalisation and agent technologies
- Annotation and recommendation services.

New course programme of International Ticer School.
The International Ticer School, formerly known as the International Summer School on the Digital Library, will offer the following library management courses in 2004.

- Digital library and e-publishing for science, technology, and medicine (4.5 days)
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, 13-18 June 2004
- Return on investment (2 days)
Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 28-29 June 2004
- Management of electronic resources and e-publishing (3 days)
Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 10-13 August 2004
- Library strategy (2 days)
Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 15-17 August 2004
- Change management (3 days)
Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 17-20 August 2004

The last three courses can be conveniently combined. Their programmes will become available in March.

Registration, for the June courses preferably before 1 April.

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