Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) was one of six sponsored by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA from 1994 through 1998. Our goal was to develop widely usable Web technology to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. We concentrated on building the experimental Illinois DLI Testbed with tens of thousands of full-text journal articles from physics, engineering, and computer science, and on making these articles available over the Internet before they are available in print. Our DLI Testbed used document structure to provide federated search across publisher collections, by merging diverse tags from multiple publishers into a single uniform collection. Our sociology research evaluated the usage of the DLI Testbed by more than a thousand UIUC faculty and students. Our technology research moved beyond document structure to document semantics, testing contextual indexing of document content on millions of documents.

The metadata elements needed to allow specialist users to find, identify, select, and obtain the resources they need and to navigate the web of relationships among them do not necessarily match the elements and rules for bibliographic cataloging of materials traditionally held by libraries. This paper will draw on experience gathering together metadata from heterogeneous sources for American Memory, particularly for the collections digitized and cataloged at other institutions through the LC/Ameritech competition. It will also reflect on several initiatives to develop rich structured metadata schemes for specific domains and others to find simple approaches to support resource discovery across domains. Trends and commonalities will be identified and influences among metadata schemes highlighted.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / As part of the ongoing Illinois Digital Library Initiative project, this paper presents the Java Search Agent Workshop (JSAW), a testbed designed for Java-based information searching. Based on artificial intelligence, neural networks, and G-Search, we implemented several search methods in Java to demonstrate their feasibility in various database, Internet, Intranet, and digital library search tasks. In addition to detailing our design rationale and implementation status, we present several sample Java implementations including a best first search spider and G-Search spider for Internet searching, and a Hopfield neural network based visualizer for database searching. Lessons learned and future directions are also presented.

From the Executive Summary of the 67 page Report: The National Science Board (NSB, the Board) recognizes the growing importance of these digital data collections for research and education, their potential for broadening participation in research at all levels, the ever increasing National Science Foundation (NSF, the Foundation) investment in creating and maintaining the collections, and the rapid multiplication of collections with a potential for decades of curation. In response the Board formed the Long-lived Data Collections Task Force. The Board and the task force undertook an analysis of the policy issues relevant to long-lived digital data collections. This report provides the findings and recommendations arising from that analysis. The primary purpose of this report is to frame the issues and to begin a broad discourse. Specifically, the NSB and NSF working together â with each fulfilling its respective responsibilities â need to take stock of the current NSF policies that lead to Foundation funding of a large number of data collections with an indeterminate lifetime and to ask what deliberate strategies will best serve the multiple research and education communities. The analysis of policy issues in Chapter IV and the specific recommendations in Chapter V of this report provide a framework within which that shared goal can be pursued over the coming months. The broader discourse would be better served by interaction, cooperation, and coordination among the relevant agencies and communities at the national and international levels. Chapters II and III of this report, describing the fundamental elements of data collections and curation, provide a useful reference upon which interagency and international discussions can be undertaken. The Board recommends that the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) take the lead in initiating and coordinating these interagency and international discussions.

Digital libraries need to provide and extend traditional library services in the digital environment. This paper presents a project that will provide and extend library services through the development of a sharium-a workspace with rich content and powerful tools where people can collaborate with others or work independently to explore information resources, learn, and solve their information problems. A sharium is a learning environment that combines the features of a collaboratory, where people collectively engage in research by sharing rich information resources, and a local library, where people come to meet, find information resources, and discuss common interests. To achieve this, collaboration services that build on synchronous and asynchronous communication technology should be integrated with other digital library services, including searching, browsing, and information management and authoring services. This paper presents our motivation for providing collaboration services and describes the types of collaboration services that will be included in the digital library.

The paper overviews theoretical background and real-world implementations for High Availability (HA) and Storage Area Network (SAN). A systems analysis process is described and a platform was built to integrate the HA and the SAN for an academic library's critical web server and its Content Management System. Recommendations for selection and implementation are suggested for people adapting this approach.

The attributes of education in a digital neighborhood have warranted a community of teachers on one end with shared curriculum and teaching materials and another community of students with distance and distributed learning on the other end. There is a different kind of ecology emerging and the library professionals have the opportunity to create a world without borders, making everything available to everyone anytime, anywhere. Roles of libraries have changed from being traditional to exist as hybrid or electronic libraries. In turn, the Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals have become intelligent filters of information and contribute to the libraries to emerge as â Knowledge Resource Centersâ . Creating successful e-information services for its demanding clientele has become their major challenge. One such case study of e-information services provided by the Science Campus (Guindy Campus) Li-brary of University of Madras is focused in this paper. The Campus Library caters to the re-search community of Schools of Life, Physical, Chemical, Earth Sciences and an array of re-searchers (members) from industries. Periodic discussions with experts, faculty and research scholars have necessitated the Library to enhance research with Information Gateways on spe-cific themes. Subject Gateways on Biomedical Sciences, Life, Chemical, Physical and Inter-disciplinary Sciences are compiled periodically and made available on the intranet in turn making its clientele access the sources on the internet from their desktop. They not only sup-plement research but also new popular courses introduced, thrust of the University programs and so on. The Gateway focused here is â Nutraceuticalsâ which is a component of the Gate-ways on â Biomedical Sciencesâ . The methodology of information aggregation from the Inter-net, evaluating their validity and organizing them for access, the strategies used to market the e-service, such as organizing user education and information literacy programs are discussed. Methods of evaluation of the service provided are analysed to improve the same. The chal-lenges of the career to develop essential skills to combat technology have compelled the pro-fessionals at the Library to get trained and update their technical expertise. Thus the Library tries to support the evolutionary convergence of Library Services, Technology and the Clien-tele.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / A University of Illinios project is developing an infrastructure for indexing scientific literature so that mutliple Internet sources can be searched as a single federated digital library.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Digital libraries serving multimedia information that may be accessed in terms of geographic content and relationships are creating special challenges and opportunities for networked information systems. An especially challenging research issue concerning collections of geo-referenced information relates to the development of techniques supporting geographic information retrieval (GIR) that is both fuzzy and concept-based. Viewing the meta-information environment of a digital library as a heterogeneous set of services that support users in terms of GIR, we define a geographic knowledge representation system (GKRS) in terms of a core set of services of the meta-information environment that is required in supporting concept-based access to collections of geospatial information. In this paper, we describe an architecture for a GKRS and its implementation in terms of a prototype system. Our GKRS architecture loosely couples a variety of multimedia knowledge sources that are in part represented in terms of the semantic network and neural network representations developed in artificial intelligence research. Both textual analysis and image processing techniques are employed in creating these textual and iconic geographcal knowledge structures. The GKRS also employs spreading activation algorithms in support of concept-based knowledge retrieval. The- paper describes implementational details of several of the components of the GKRS as well as discussing both the lessons learned from, and future directions of, our research.

The difference between a digital library and a library with which a digital reference service is affiliated is discussed, and digital reference in these contexts is defined. There are several issues involved in integrating digital reference service into a digital library environment, but two that are unique to the intersection between digital libraries and digital reference: collection development of previously-answered questions, and presentation of specialized subsets of the materials in the digital library's collection. These two issues are explored.