ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 72 | December 2004
Report on the 8th
European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2004) 12
The European Conference on Digital Libraries
(ECDL 2004) was held in September at the University of Bath, United Kingdom.
The conference offered a total of 47 papers and was hosted by UKOLN—a centre
of expertise in digital information management located at the
The conference presentations gave an excellent overview of current digital
library research projects. Digital libraries are created for an increasingly
diverse and widely distributed user community, and integrate directly into e-research
and e-science. The importance digital libraries play in e-science and the ‘Semantic
Grid’ was emphasised in the keynote speech by Professor Tony Hey, Director,
E-learning also received attention. As an increasing proportion of learning is mediated by the Internet, it becomes important to integrate digital learning and digital library environments. Director Neil McLean from IMS Australia addressed these integration issues in his keynote speech.
Lorcan Dempsey from OCLC (
George Pyronakis from the Libraries Computer Centre,
MacKenzie Smith from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) talked about the DSpace digital repository system. DSpace may not have been the first digital library software project to go open source, but they may be the first to, at least publicly, realise the importance of actively nurturing the community. To build an open source community it is insufficient to publish a body of code as open source and wait for a community to coalesce. A successful open source project with multiple contributors is difficult to achieve and requires the transformation of users who are initially consumers into stakeholders. The DSpace federation have been looking at successful models such as Apache Foundation, Linux, Global Grid Forum and Eclipse Foundation in order to formulate plans. This is relevant to the NLA as we are also hoping to build a community of developers for a Web Archiving Management Systems based on an open-source release of our PANDAS system.
Fabio Simeoni from the Centre for Digital Library Research at the
Toby Burrows from the
Many of the papers were highly technical and once such example was an update
on the research results of the MiDiLib
research project at the Department of Computer Science at the
—Monica Berko,
Director, Applications Branch
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