Provides an overview of digital library aggregation services, organizes them into functional clusters, and evaluates them from the perspective of an informed user. Most of the services under review rely wholly or partially on the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI-PMH).

We are delighted to present the ECDL 2004 Conference proceedings from the 8th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital - braries at the University of Bath, Bath, UK. This followed an impressive and geographicallydispersedseriesof locationsfor previousevents: Pisa(1997),H- aklion(1998),Paris(1999),Lisbon (2000),Darmstadt(2001),Rome (2002),and Trondheim (2003). The conference re?ected the rapidly evolving landscape of digital libraries, both in technology developments and in the focus of approaches to implem- tation. An emphasis on the requirements of the individual user and of diverse and distributed user communities was apparent. In addition, the conference p- gramme began to address, possibly for the ?rst time, the associated themes of e-research/e-scienceand e-learning and their relationship to digital libraries. We observed increasing commonality in both the distributed information archit- tures and the technical standards that underpin global infrastructure devel- ments. Digital libraries are integral to this information landscape and to the creation of increasingly powerful tools and applications for resource discovery and knowledge extraction. Digital libraries support and facilitate the data and information ?ows within the scholarly knowledge cycle and provide essential - abling functionality for both learnersand researchers. The varied and innovative research activities presented at ECDL 2004 demonstrate the exciting potential of this very fast-moving ?eld. The 148 papers, 43 posters, 5 panels, 14 tutorials and 4 workshops subm- ted this year were once again of the highest quality.

Digital libraries (DLs) have introduced new technologies, as well as leveraging, enhancing, and integrating related technologies, since the early 1990s. These efforts have been enriched through a formal approach, e.g., the 5S (Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Structures, Streams) framework, which is discussed in two earlier volumes in this series. This volume should help advance work not only in DLs, but also in the WWW and other information systems. Drawing upon four (Kozievitch, Murthy, Park, Yang) completed and three (Elsherbiny, Farag, Srinivasan) in-process dissertations, as well as the efforts of collaborating researchers and scores of related publications, presentations, tutorials, and reports, this book should advance the DL field with regard to at least six key technologies. By integrating surveys of the state-of-the-art, new research, connections with formalization, case studies, and exercises/projects, this book can serve as a computing or information science textbook. It can support studies in cyber-security, document management, hypertext/hypermedia, IR, knowledge management, LIS, multimedia, and machine learning. Chapter 1, with a case study on fingerprint collections, focuses on complex (composite, compound) objects, connecting DL and related work on buckets, DCC, and OAI-ORE. Chapter 2, discussing annotations, as in hypertext/hypermedia, emphasizes parts of documents, including images as well as text, managing superimposed information. The SuperIDR system, and prototype efforts with Flickr, should motivate further development and standardization related to annotation, which would benefit all DL and WWW users. Chapter 3, on ontologies, explains how they help with browsing, query expansion, focused crawling, and classification. This chapter connects DLs with the Semantic Web, and uses CTRnet as an example. Chapter 4, on (hierarchical) classification, leverages LIS theory, as well as machine learning, and is important for DLs as well as the WWW. Chapter 5, on extraction from text, covers document segmentation, as well as how to construct a database from heterogeneous collections of references (from ETDs); i.e., converting strings to canonical forms. Chapter 6 surveys the security approaches used in information systems, and explains how those approaches can apply to digital libraries which are not fully open. Given this rich content, those interested in DLs will be able to find solutions to key problems, using the right technologies and methods. We hope this book will help show how formal approaches can enhance the development of suitable technologies and how they can be better integrated with DLs and other information systems.

Addresses the influence of research funding on advances in libraries and librarianship from two perspectives: funding agents and specific initiatives.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International C- ference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL 2008) held in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2008. The objective of this conference series is to provide a forum for presentation of high-quality research in the ?eld of digital libraries. ICADL 2008 provided an opportunity for digital libraries researchers and practitioners in the Asia Paci?c area and beyond to gather to explore ideas, exchange and share experiences, and further build the research network in this region. ICADL 2008 was a truly international event, with presenters from 21 countries. A total of 63 papers were accepted for inclusion in the proceedings: 30 full papers, 20 short papers, and extended abstracts of 13 posters. Submissions were subject to a rigorous, blind peer-review process. The research topics cover the spectrum of digital libraries, including multimedia digital libraries, usab- ity and evaluation, information retrieval, ontologies, social tagging, metadata issues, multi- and cross-language retrieval, digital preservation, scholarly p- lishing and communities, and more. Additionally, three tutorials were o?ered in association with the conference by Andreas Rauber (Vienna University of Technology), David Bainbridge (University of Waikato), and George Buchanan (Swansea University).