Technologies for the 21st Century Digital Libraries Initiative

	The Initiative Digital Video Library Project Interoperability and DLITE Intelligent access The Alexandria Project Scientific literature on the Internet Interspace Multimedia testbed of Earth and space science data Workshops
The Initiative	The Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) is a joint four year NSF/DARPA/NASA program begun in FY 1995. Its broad goal is to advance the methods used to collect, store, organize, and use widely distributed knowledge resources that contain diverse types of information and content stored in a variety of electronic forms. Six university-led DLI projects are pursuing this goal in partnership with libraries, museums, publishers, schools, and computing and communications companies.
Digital Video Library Project	The Informedia Digital Video Library Project at Carnegie Mellon University uses intelligent, automatic mechanisms that provide users with full-content search and retrieval from online digital video that can scale to several thousand hours. The project is creating a multimedia library of more than 1,000 hours of digital video, audio, images, text, and related materials. New digital video library technology allows independent access to information for self-teaching and exploration, which can improve the ways in which both education and training are delivered. Tools that can automatically populate the library and support access via desktop computers on local, metropolitan, and wide area networks are being developed.
Interoperability and DLITE	Stanford University's Digital Library project focuses on interoperability. At its heart is a testbed that runs the "InfoBus" protocol, providing uniform access to various services and information sources through "proxies" that act as interpreters. The Stanford Digital Library testbed is used to experiment with interoperability among these services. Distributed objects allow processes to be implemented in different languages on computing systems with differing architectures.   The Digital Library Integrated Task Environment (DLITE) is an experimental, direct-manipulation interface to information objects and services. Information services are accessed via the InfoBus and are presented to the user as components in workcenters. DLITE is designed to make it easy for users to interact with many different services while focusing on a single task.
Intelligent access	The University of California-Berkeley Digital Library project's goal is to develop technologies for intelligent access to massive, distributed multi-terabyte databases of photographs, satellite images, videos, maps, full text documents, as well as "multivalent" documents that presume a single document consists of multiple layers of different but closely related material. A major component of the project is to develop a large testbed of data and services that provides public access to environmental datasets.
The Alexandria Project	The Alexandria Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara is building the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) -- a distributed digital library that will give users the ability to access and manipulate digital information in a variety of collection items, ranging from maps and images to text and multimedia. From the Internet, users and librarians will access various components of ADL, such as its catalog and collections, through powerful, graphical interfaces. In 1996, more than 2,000 registered users tested the ADL's Web Prototype (WP). In addition to providing valuable feedback on the appearance, usability, and content of the WP, the testing process helped researchers identify major problems such as system bottlenecks and speed and bandwidth issues.   In response to this testing program as well as additional research, the Alexandria Project will design and implement a new interface that will provide users with more functional options and greater ease of use.
Scientific literature on the Internet	The Digital Libraries Initiative project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is developing technology to handle digital libraries of scientific literature on the Internet effectively. The results will include digital library software and sociological evaluation of its use with hundreds of users searching tens of thousands of documents. Repositories of indexed multiple-source collections are being built and indexed by searching the material via multiple views of a single virtual collection. Both the testbed and production facilities as well as the Internet client are now operational. Concept spaces for 1,000 subfields of engineering have been computed on 10,000,000 abstracts using 10 days of supercomputer time -- the largest computation ever in information science and a major step towards semantic interoperability.
Interspace	The Interspace research project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign seeks to unify disparate distributed information resources in one coherent model. The Interspace is a collection of interlinked information spaces where each component space encodes the knowledge of a community or a subject domain. Standard services include interobject linking, remote execution, object caching, and support for compound objects (usually referred to as compound documents). Additionally, the Interspace system acknowledges the importance of legacy applications and supports their integration into the system in a relatively seamless manner. Ultimately, the Interspace system goal is to represent all types of data/objects in one flexible, cohesive, and scalable system.
Multimedia testbed of Earth and space science data	The University of Michigan Digital Library (UMDL) project is a multimedia testbed of Earth and space science data that supports "inquiry-based" approaches to science education in middle and high schools, as well as instruction and research at the university. For example, the project offers high school students links to scientific information about minerals such as the Smithsonian's Gem and Mineral Collection, NASA's Earth and Space Science Application Project, and NOAA's National Geophysical Data center. The core of the project is an agent architecture that supports the teaming of agents to provide complex services by combining the limited capabilities of individual agents. R&D efforts aimed at deploying the UMDL in real-world settings focus on the need for advanced, friendlier interfaces that support simple or complex inquiries by students and teachers.
Workshops	The Digital Libraries Initiative sponsors numerous workshops. Recent workshops have included the following: Report of the Santa Fé Planning Workshop on Distributed Knowledge Work Environments: Digital Libraries, March 9-11, 1997 Federation Across Heterogeneous Databases, A Report on the Spring 1997 Partners Workshop, April 3-4, 1997 Libraries, People, and Change: A Research Forum on Digital Libraries, A Report on the October 27-29, 1996, Allerton Institute Workshop on Technology of Terms and Conditions, A Report on the September 24-26, 1996 Workshop at Columbia University DLI Spring Partner's Workshop, May 2-3, 1996, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign DLI SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) Mathematics Workshop, May 1, 1996, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Social Aspects of Digital Libraries, A Report on the February 15-17, 1996, UCLA-NSF Social Aspects of Digital Libraries Workshop Information on these workshops is available at http://dli.grainger.uiuc.edu/workshops.htm.