Digital libraries '96

Some 400 people attended Digital Libraries (DL) '96 (http://www.dlib.org/ dl96.html), held in Bethesda, Maryland, in late March. Although the third meeting with this title, this was the first to be sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) through the organization's SIGIR and SIGLINK, with additional sponsorship from a number of other organizations, including ASIS. Future DL conferences will be held in conjunction with SIGIR and SIGLINK North American annual meetings.

Attendees included representatives of academia (faculty and students from computer science, library and information science and other fields), libraries of many types, the information industries, the information retrieval research community, information systems managers and other domains-almost a typical ASIS conference mix with a large handful of computer scientists and engineers thrown in.

Pre-conference tutorials on Information Retrieval and Hypertext (Ed Fox), Foundations of the Organization of Information (Elaine Svenonius), Z39.50 (Ray Denenberg) and Documents and Digital Libraries (David Levy) were very well attended and leftover handouts were quite popular in the following days.

Barry Leiner's opening plenary address on Interoperability Issues in Digital Libraries addressed the need for retaining traditional services (access, collection development, organization, preservation, annotation) in the digital library context and highlighted progress in a number of interoperability projects. The first paper session focused on Multimedia Digital Libraries, including presentations on the Perseus Project, musical tune retrieval and a digital video library. This was followed by a choice between two working sessions, one on Metadata to Describe Information in Digital Libraries and one on User Needs Assessment and Evaluation. Working sessions had been placed on the DL '96 web site for perusal prior to the meeting, and the sessions featured several brief presentations followed by questions and discussion. In most cases this proved to be an effective format (the more so when the attendees had actually visited the web site). In the metadata session most discussion centered on the problems of responsibility for metadata entry.

The next paper session presented Library and Information Science Perspectives, looking at the role of library services and activities in digital libraries. Working sessions on Social Aspects of Digital Libraries and on Repository Interactions followed. The latter brought up problems of transparency of access, variations in schemata and naming, and the balance between autonomy and cross-collection interaction. A paper session on Browsing and Visualization included demonstrations of several graphical information retrieval projects. The program ended with a poster session collection of 14 descriptions of specific projects, with an opportunity to chat with the authors. Finally, the first day ended with the conference banquet, which included a presentation by Ann Okerson on How Will We Know When It Is a Library?

The first paper session on the second day, Images and Spatial Organization, included a fascinating demonstration of the interactive visible human (some of which was perhaps a little too visible right after breakfast, judging by audience reaction). Morning working sessions offered a choice between Digitization and Conversion or Naming Objects in the Digital Library. The naming session featured a lively discussion of URN, PURL, GILS and the problems of standardmaking versus pragmatic solutions. The final morning paper session on Documents included discussion of the relationship between physical objects and their digital representations in a networked environment.

The next two paper sessions on Information Retrieval and Document Indexing and Analysis presented research on natural language processing, thesaurus tools for digital libraries, hyperlink generation from text, automatic handwriting indexing and copy detection. The final panel of the conference featured progress reports on digital library projects at the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, and the National Library of Medicine.

All in all, an intense and informative two days. Conference Chair Gary Marchionini had community-building in mind when planning the event, and to a large degree he seems to have succeeded. Two observations along these lines: it was clear that the computer science (largely academic) community was surprised by the participation of the library world (why?), and it was also evident that some of those mounting digital library research projects had not been exposed to the past 40 years' worth of work in information retrieval with which we are familiar through the pages of JASIS, Information Processing & Management and similar literature. This annual conference could go some way toward preventing some of the inevitable wheel reinvention which might otherwise occur.

Upcoming ASIS Meetings

October 21-26, Baltimore 1996 ASIS Annual Meeting Global Complexity: Information, Chaos and Control

The 1996 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science will explore complexity theory as it pertains to the working world of information professionals. Among the topics to be addressed are generation and dissemination of information; information organization and access; and social implications of complex information systems.

June 2-4, 1997, Scottsdale, Arizona 1997 ASIS Mid-Year Meeting Information Privacy, Integrity and Data Security

The 1997 Mid-Year Meeting of ASIS will examine a variety of social and technical issues associated with the increasing demand for security in the electronic era. Among the issues to be addressed are information policy and legal issues; privacy and ethical norms; social and organizational change; civil rights, empowerment and equality; and electronic publishing.

November 1-5, 1997, Washington, DC 1997 ASIS Annual Meeting Digital Collections: Implications for Users, Funders, Developers and Maintainers

The 1997 Annual Meeting of ASIS will look at the emerging phenomenon of collections of digital objects-text, image, sound and multimedia-accumulated in both central and distributed repositories or virtual collections. Topics to be addressed will include research, technical, cultural, political, economic and other key issues for users, funders, developers and maintainers.

For further information on these upcoming meetings, contact ASIS, 8720 Georgia Avenue, Suite 501, Silver Spring, MD 20910; 301/495-0900; fax: 301/495-0810.

Candy Schwartz is associate professor in the Graduate School of Library & Information Science at Simmons College in Boston. She can be contacted at http://www.simmons. edu/~schwartz

Copyright American Society for Information Science Jun/Jul 1996
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