Sunday, May 23, 1999

9:30 - 17:00 Preconference TUTORIAL - full day

Ed Fox (USA): Digital libraries: An overview

The tutorial requires separate fee and registration.


This tutorial extends previous educational efforts related to digital libraries, including a number of tutorials at conferences and workshops, as well as both undergraduate and graduate courses in Fall 1997. It draws upon the Web site of self-study digital library materials at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~dlib/ that evolved from an NSF-supported digital library computer science courseware effort (http://ei.cs.vt.edu). The aim of this tutorial is to ground attendees in the history, topics, concepts, projects, systems, resources, and references related to digital libraries. It should prepare them to participate in educational, research, and development efforts in the field. It also should provide a theoretical basis and conceptual framework for further investigation and study.


To allow flexibility in scheduling, the morning session will aim to cover the needs of those unfamiliar with digital libraries. In that sense it will be introductory, though attendees may be experts in related areas. The afternoon session will have a more advanced focus, but should be accessible to those with intermediate or advanced backgrounds who may not have attended the morning session.


Unique to this tutorial is grounding in an evolving theoretical framework that has been in development at Virginia Tech since 1997. The "5S" model explains digital libraries through 5 constructs:

• Streams
• Spaces
• Structures
• Scenarios
• Societies

and builds from mathematical definitions to the point of describing real systems. Work is underway at Virginia Tech by several Ph.D. students to construct pedagogical materials and tools around the 5S model that will be used in the tutorial, so it will be in the CoLIS spirit. Though introduced briefly in the morning, the 5S model will be explored again at the end of the day to recap and organize what has been covered.


The tutorial will begin with an Introduction. This includes sections on Definitions, Foundations, and Scenarios and Perspectives. It continues with an overview of

• References
• Courses
• Conferences/Workshops
• Journals
• Repositories and Bibliographies
• Books.

Next there is a section to help attendees ground their understanding in specifics. Coverage of Resources deals with:

• Projects
• People
• Countries and regions
• Centers, sites and organizations.

The main section of the course involves a number of Topics. A few of the most popular ones will be covered in the morning, and the rest in the afternoon. To help clarify the coverage, included below are pointers to chapters in the book by Michael Lesk that relate to the discussion.


The topics include:

• Search, retrieval, resource discovery (Ch. 2 in: Lesk, M. (1997) Practical digital libraries: Books, bytes, and bucks. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufman.).
• Multimedia, representations (See Chapter 4 in Dr. Lesk's book.)
• Architectures (See Chapter 6 in Dr. Lesk's book.)
• Interfaces (See Chapter 7 in Dr. Lesk's book.)
• Metadata
• Electronic publishing, SGML, XML
• Database issues
• Agents
• Commerce, economics, publishers (See Ch. 9 in Dr. Lesk's book.)
• Intellectual property rights, copyright laws & security (See Chapter 10 in Dr. Lesk's book.)
• Social issues (See Chapters 11, 12 in Dr. Lesk's book.).

For more information see the online materials mentioned above (http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~dlib/).

Biographical sketch of the presenter:


Edward A. Fox
Professor
Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech, 660 McBryde Hall
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0106 USA
Phone +1-540-231-5113, FAX +1-540-231-6075, Email fox@vt.edu


Dr. Edward A. Fox holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University, and a B.S. from M.I.T. Since 1983 he has been at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI&SU), where he serves as Associate Director for Research at the Computing Center, and Professor of Computer Science. He directs the Digital Library Research Laboratory, the Internet Technology Innovation Center at Virginia Tech, "Curriculum Resources in Interactive Multimedia", "Improving Graduate Education with a National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations", and a number of other research and development projects. In addition to his courses at Virginia Tech, Dr. Fox has taught more than 30 tutorials, in 11 countries. For the Association for Computing Machinery he served 1988-91 as a member of the Publications Board and as editor-in-chief of ACM Press Database Products (responsible for the broad area of electronic publishing including online, CD-ROM, hypertext, interactive multimedia, and developing an electronic library). He also served from 1987-95 as vice chair and then chair of the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, from 1992-94 as founder and chairman of the Steering Committee for the ACM Multimedia series of conferences, and from 1995-98 as founder and chairman of the Steering Committee for the ACM digital libraries series of conferences. He served as program chair for ACM SIGIR'95 and ACM DL'96, is program chair for ACM DL'99, and is on the editorial board for ACM/Springer Journal on Multimedia Systems. He was project director for the Virginia Disc series of CD-ROMs as well as for VPI&SU work on interactive digital video. He is editor for Morgan Kaufmann Publishers book series on Multimedia Information and Systems. He also serves on the editorial boards of Electronic Publishing (Origination, Dissemination and Design), Information Processing and Management, Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, Journal of Universal Computer Science, and Multimedia Tools and Applications. He has authored or co-authored numerous publications in the areas of digital libraries, information storage and retrieval, hypertext/hypermedia/multimedia, computational linguistics, CD-ROM and optical disc technology, electronic publishing, and expert systems.

Thursday, May 27, 1999

9:00 - 13:00 Postconference WORKSHOPS (Interuniversity Centre)

The workshops are free to those that paid conference registration fee, but require workshop registration.

Sanda Erdelez; Philip Doty (USA): Developing a small-scale digital library with Adobe Acrobat: Techniques and issues.


The main goals of this workshop are two-fold:

1) To provide practical experience in creating a small-scale digital library by digitizing documents using Adobe Acrobat to create electronic files in Portable Data Format (PDF).

2) To examine and consider important issues related to the development and use of a small-scale digital library containing Adobe Acrobat files, e.g., security and privacy.

Topics:

All kinds of organizations are beginning to use digital library applications to manage, store, and disseminate information. Yet many information and other mangers believe that their only choices are large-scale digital libraries with tens of thousands of documents developed with major integrated systems or existing hybrid print and in-house electronic libraries. This workshop offers a third, middle ground alternative: using Adobe Acrobat PDF files, a de facto and affordable standard, adaptable to a multitude of environments, dynamic document use, and many work practices. The hands-on portion of the workshop will have participants digitize a print document using both optical character recognition and bit map applications, compare the results for searchability and other characteristics, and convert an electronic document to PDF for manipulation. Participants will take away a number of products from the workshop: a workbook with specific tricks and tips for PDF, an Adobe Acrobat glossary, a collection of case studies, and other instructional material. Other topics are described in the planned activities below.

Part 1: Introduction. What is Adobe Acrobat? Comparison with HTML. Example of applications: DECaL (a digital judicial library).

Part 2: Explanation and demonstration of digitization processes with Adobe Acrobat.

Part 3: Hands-on exercises with various formats of digitization with Adobe Acrobat.

Part 4: Identification of major organizational, social and legal problems of an in-house digital library developed with Adobe Acrobat e.g., security, authenticity of users and documents, copyright, and privacy.

Part 5: Examples of organizational contexts. Case studies and exercises


Biographical sketches of the presenters:


Dr. Sanda Erdelez is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Her educational background is in law and information science (Bachelor of Laws, 1982, and Master of Laws, 1986, both from the University of Osijek, Croatia; Ph.D. 1995, Information Transfer, Syracuse University). She taught Comparative Consitutional Law, Information Law, and Legal Informatics at the University of Osijek Law School in Croatia. In 1987 she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for doctoral studies in the U.S. Her areas of sholarly interest involve behaviour of information users, legal knowledge management, and business intelligence. At GSLIS Dr. Erdelez is a coordinator of the Legal Informatics Program. She can be reached at serdelez@uts.cc.utexas.edu, or http://porsche.gslis.utexas.edu/sanda/sevita.html.


Dr. Philip Doty is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. His primary research and teaching interests center on governmental information policy, computer networks, and digital libraries. He has done research sponsored by NASA, the Office of Management and Budget, the Congressional Office of Technology Assesment, and other governmental and private entities. He is an Associate Director of Telecommunications and Information Policy Institute at the University of Texas. He received Ph.D. from Syracuse University's School of Information Studies in 1995. He can be reached at pdoty@uts.cc.utexas.edu, or http://www.gslis.utexas,edu/~pdoty/index.htm.

Ed Fox (USA): Metrics and evaluation for Digital Libraries.