First Workshop
on Very Large Digital Libraries

Sponsored by the DELOS Association

In conjunction with the 12th European Conference on
Research and Advanced Technologies on Digital Libraries
Aarhus, Denmark, September 19, 2008
(ECDL 2008)

| Objectives | Program | Registration | Program Committee |

Workshop Objectives

In today’s information society the demand for Digital Libraries is changing. The implementation of nowadays Digital Libraries is more demanding than in the past. Information consumers are facing with the need to have access to an ever growing and heterogeneous information space while information providers are interested in satisfying such needs by providing rich and organised views over such information deluge. Because of their fundamental role of information production and dissemination vehicle, Digital Libraries are also expected to provide information society with services that must be available 24/7 and guarantee the expected quality of service.

This scenario leads to the development of “Large-Scale Digital Libraries” in terms of number of Information Objects and Collections to be made available, users to be served and potentially distributed resources needed to implement such systems. Such systems have to confront with new challenges in a context having scalability, interoperability and sustainability as focal points.

The need for concrete solutions can be seen also in the substantial amount of resources invested by the European Union towards the creation of a unifying European Information Space, starting with DELOS, BRICKS, DILIGENT and DRIVER in the past, and continuing with D4Science (a DILIGENT follow on), DRIVER-II, CLARIN, SAPIR and finally with the European Digital Library, a major effort to build a European-scale digital library to make available to everybody the rich cultural assets of the whole Europe.

New approaches and technologies have been devised to appropriately tackle the various matters arising in deploying large-scale Digital Library systems. The goal of this workshop is to provide researchers, practitioners and application developers with a forum fostering a constructive exchange among all of such key actors.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Service Architectures/Infrastructures for large-scale DL systems
• Experiences in building and operating large-scale DL systems
• Integration and Federation of existing DL systems
• Building and Managing Distributed Information Spaces
• Sustainability methodologies in large-scale DLs
• Scalability management in large-scale DLs
• Interoperability techniques in large-scale DLs
• Quality of Service methodologies in large-scale DLs
• Data management in large-scale DLs
• Organisational models for large-scale Digital Libraries

Paper Submission and Publication

Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers. Submitted manuscripts will be limited to 8 pages, following the guidelines for the LNCS format provided by Springer. Preferred formats are PDF or Microsoft Word. Papers should be submitted via email to . Papers submitted to the workshop will undergo a peer-review process. Accepted papers will be published as a volume in the DELOS workshop proceedings series, which will also be made available in the DELOS digital library. For every accepted paper, at least one author is required to attend the workshop and present the paper. Depending upon the number and quality of the submissions, efforts to coordinate follow-on publications may be made, involving journal publication of extended versions of some of the accepted papers.

Workshop Program

To be defined after the closing of the Call for Submissions

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: July 1, 2008
Acceptance notification: July 25, 2008
Camera ready version: September 3, 2008
Workshop: September 19, 2008

Program Committee

Stefan Gradman, Institut für Bibliotheks und Informationswissenschaft, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Kat Hagedorn, OAIster System, University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service, USA
Dean B. Krafft, National Science Digital Library Project, Cornell Information Science, USA
Yosi Mass, IBM Research Division, Haifa Research Laboratory, University Campus, Haifa, Israel
Yannis Ioannidis, Department of Informatics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Peter Wittenburg, Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands

Organisers
Paolo Manghi
ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

Pasquale Pagano
ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

Pavel Zezula
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

For any inquiries, please contact the organisers at