Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: Second European Conference, ECDL ’98, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, September 1998 Proceedings

Citation

Smith, A.G. (2000), "Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: Second European Conference, ECDL ’98, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, September 1998 Proceedings", Online Information Review, Vol. 24 No. 5, pp. 401-411. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2000.24.5.401.7

The burgeoning literature on digital library development is split into two relatively distinct camps: on one hand, the engineering orientation of computer science; on the other, the user, management and content orientation of library and information studies. Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries is a volume of papers from the now well‐established series of European conferences on digital libraries. This conference is firmly in the computer science camp, though the listed reviewers include people well known in the LIS community such as Clifford Lynch of CNI, Stuart Weibel of OCLC and Ann Okerson of Yale.

As might be expected, the conference shows a European perspective, both in authors and the topics addressed. There is a strong interest in multilingual retrieval (Braschler and Schäuble investigate methods of matching news stories in different languages; Doerr and Fundalaki examine multilingual distributed thesauri, Kraaij and Pohlmann detail the specific problems of applying automatic indexing techniques to Dutch language texts). However, the authorship is definitely international, including authors from Southeast Asia and Australasia. Hunter and Iannella from Brisbane discuss the application of metadata to news video clip indexing. The use of Dublin Core extensions for moving images illustrates the problem of using a simple metadata scheme for a wide range of objects, since significant extensions to DC are required.

Not many of the papers deal with user evaluation and behaviour. Jones et al. recount a transaction log analysis of the New Zealand Digital Library. An inter alia conclusion was that the problems of US/British English differences were not taken account of; this is important in describing many digital library topics, e.g. information‐seeking behaviour/behavior; data visualization/visualisation. However, most of the papers concerned with performance measurement and evaluation are on the evaluation of the operational efficiency of systems; for example, the paper by Kapidakis et al. on “management architecture” is concerned with performance measurement in the sense of load balancing.

The value of this volume to LIS professionals lies in the glimpses that it gives of developments on the horizon, even though some of these have been on the horizon for some time: the automatic indexing of content (index term extraction from news media, the SPIRE project of content based imaging of satellite data), automatic translation, video indexing, spoken document retrieval, etc. Some papers are concerned with wider projects that illustrate a number of technologies and issues, for example Neuhold and Ferber on Global‐Info, an umbrella scheme of German scientific digital library projects addressing issues such as access to databases, coordination of information from scientific learned societies and publishers. Metadata is also a strong theme in the papers. For instance, Faulstich and Spiliopoulou describe their HyperView system to extract metadata structures from e‐journals, and Malloch et al. discuss the use of DC metadata in a performing arts digital library.

As well as the papers, there are also posters, special sessions and panels included as short papers at the end of the volume. The special sessions addressed wider issues, and some of the papers here are of particular LIS interest – Drenth on preservation and access, Law on the access vs holdings dilemma (“not for nothing has a Dilbert cartoon appeared noting that all the time saved through automation and computers in the last 50 years has been entirely outweighed by people sitting in front of PCs waiting for Web pages to load”).

Libraries have been arguably in e‐commerce for longer than anyone else, in that telnet to library online catalogues was the first application of supplying goods over the Internet. The growth of e‐commerce and its implications for digital libraries was the subject of the Delos Workshop associated with the Conference, and the papers from this are included. These cover a number of e‐commerce technologies that have implications for digital libraries, although the implications are not always made explicit. The Delos Workshop includes a useful paper by Lakoumentas and Protonotarios on intellectual property rights and their implications for the global information network.

As with many conference proceedings, this volume reproduces the authors’ original papers, leading to variable proofreading and typefaces. The volume has a slightly confusing layout in that boundaries between thematic sessions are not marked. There is an author but not a subject index. In terms of content, though, the computer science literature represented by Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries cannot be ignored by LIS professionals, and this volume provides a valuable sampler of the kinds of projects and issues that will shape our libraries of the future.