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The first column in this series appeared not long after the OCLC/ NCSA Metadata Workshop, an effort to bring together experts from various stakeholder communities from the library, computer, and text‐encoding communities. The objective of this workshop was to forge a consensus surrounding a lightweight, core description record that would be useful for locating Internet resources, but that could be created relatively inexpensively by authors or others who were not necessarily schooled in the nuances of conventional cataloging.

The World Wide Web, an Internet‐based hypertext system, swept onto the Internet scene about 18 months ago as a result of the widespread popularity of Mosaic, the universal client software developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. Mosaic provided an easy‐to‐use interface that struck a responsive chord in Internet users hungry for content and tired of the arcane syntax of command‐line Internet services.

The Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment (CORE), a five‐year R&D project, was one of the earliest attempts to make a substantial volume of the text and graphics from previously published scholarly journals available to end‐users in electronic form, across a computer network. Since CORE dealt with material that had already gone through traditional print publication, its emphasis was on the process (and limitations) of conversion, the optimization of presentation, and use of the converted contents for readers. This article focuses on the user response to the system.

The CORE project is an electronic library prototype that provides networked access to the full text and graphics content of American Chemical Society journals and associated Chemical Abstracts Service indexing since 1980 (some 250 journal years of data). The database is coded in Standard Generalized Markup Language (translated from original typography codes) which captures the structural richness of the original document and provides flexibility for indexing, searching, and display. The prototype provides a full‐scale laboratory environment in which to explore issues of database structure, user interface capabilities, and information retrieval questions on a large, real‐world scholarly electronic journal database. The complete database, representing more than 600,000 pages of full text and graphics, will be the largest electronic corpus of its kind. Scheduled for availability at Cornell in late 1993, this database will be available for use by the Cornell Chemistry Department faculty and students on a local area network (although the architecture of the CORE system is extensible to wide area networks as well)

The conference co‐ordinator and an invited speaker of the International Conference on Digital Libraries (ICDL) which took place in New Delhi, India, February 2004 provide an overview of the conference – one of a growing series of digital library conferences that bring together computer scientists and librarians. The objectives of this conference were to bridge the knowledge gaps between developing and developed countries; initiate capacity building activities in digital libraries; evolve a road map for the digitization of archives, manuscripts and libraries; provide a forum for facilitating interaction among participants; and formulate recommendations on digitization technologies and policies. Outlines the themes and topics covered and provides the main points of the inaugural address to the conference by the President of India as well as the three keynote addresses.

Metadata has many potential uses and benefits. One of those is to aid in the considerable challenge we with respect to the issue of digital preservation. The many potential uses of metadata however raise the question of how we can avoid having a whole plethora of standards.

This article aims to discuss some of the principal digital libraries projects during the 1990s and the impact that they had on modern libraries.

The paper combines information from contemporary papers about the projects with recollections by the author who was personally associated with many of the projects.

The paper reveals that, about 1990, computing reached a point where it became economically possible to mount large collections online and to access them over networks. The result was a flurry of experiments and prototypes. Many are almost forgotten, yet the libraries of today were formed by the energy and creativity of these efforts. The paper places some of the most influential projects in context and discusses why some prototypes and experiments succeeded while others fell by the wayside.

Several of the projects were never described formally in the academic literature, and there are no contemporary records to check some of the author's recollections.

The value of this paper is that many of the projects that formed the libraries of today were poorly documented and it is already difficult to find good information about some of them.

Recounts the 8th International Dublin Core Metadata Workshop held in Ottawa, Canada, October 4‐6, 2000. It provides overviews of the working group process, and developments within the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI). NISO standardization, Dublin Core qualifiers, application profiles, administrative metadata, agent qualifiers, DC‐Education, DC‐Registries, DC‐Citation progress, and Extensible Open RDF Toolkit were main discussion topics of this workshop. This article also describes future goals of the DCMI, including additional qualifiers, multi‐lingual issues, and documentation policies.