National Library of Australia  - Gateways

ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 72 | December 2004


Report on the 8th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL 2004) 12–16 September 2004, Bath, United Kingdom

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 University of Bath. It was attended by Monica Berko, Director of IT Applications at the National Library of Australia (NLA).

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, UK e-Science Program.

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 (Online Library Computer Center) spoke about the rapidly changing library landscape and introduced some interesting new terminology. One of the most apparent changes libraries face is the change in expectations created by Google and Amazon—or ‘Why can’t the OPAC work as Google/Amazon?’ This change in expectations was labelled the ‘Amazoogle’ effect.

George Pyronakis from the Libraries Computer Centre, University of Athens gave a case study presentation on their efforts to design an integrated digital library framework. They chose Fedora for the underlying framework and are extending it for their own requirements. The selection criteria they used were: preservation capabilities; multilingual support; support for digitisation workflows; support for external deposit workflows; support for harvesting workflows (e.g. OAI); support for multiple heterogeneous collections (both physical and digital); flexibility and expandability; and separation of content storage, metadata and presentation

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 University of Strathclyde gave a paper titled ‘Servicing the Federation: The Case for Metadata Harvesting’. He was addressing the problem of how to deliver computational queries against distributed data and compared the two models used—distributed computing or harvesting. He concluded that harvesting offers stronger guarantees to meet service flexibility and scalability.

Toby Burrows from the University of Western Australia Library presented a paper on the building of a national digital library of Australian music. This paper was co-authored by Robyn Holmes and Marie-Louise Ayres, the MusicAustralia Project Manager. MusicAustralia is a joint development of the NLA and ScreenSound, due for release this month, and is a web portal for anyone interested in Australian music.

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 University of Bonn. Their main focus is developing content-based retrieval algorithms for both score and wave-form-based digital music content. For example, being able to hum a tune into a microphone attached to your personal computer, and retrieve both scores and audio files that contain that melodic phrase from the digital library.
—Monica Berko, Director, Applications Branch

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