Second DELOS International Summer School on Digital Library Technologies
ISDL 2002
8-12 July 2002, Pisa, Italy

By Stefano Bocconi

Introduction

DELOS Network of Excellence in Digital Library (http://delos-noe.iei.pi.cnr.it/) promotes research and development in the field of digital library in Europe and it is an initiative funded by the European Commission's Information Society Technologies 5th Framework Programme (IST-FP5).
This was the second Summer School organised by the DELOS Network of Excellence, and it was focused on specific issues related to Digital Library applications, i.e., the exploitation of Digital Library technologies in several application domains.

The Program

Monday, 8 July 2002
Presentation of the School - Costantino Thanos (IEI-CNR, Italy)
Introduction to Digital Libraries - Gary Marchionini (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)
Metadata - Thomas Baker (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Germany)

Tuesday, 9 July 2002
Geospatial Digital Libraries - Terry Smith (University of California at Santa Barbara, USA)
Digital Libraries in Health Applications - Judith Klavans (Columbia University, USA)

Wednesday, 10 July 2002
Digital Music Libraries - Jon Dunn (Indiana University, USA)

Thursday, 11 July 2002
Digital Libraries in the Humanities - Gregory Crane (Tufts University, USA)
Digital Libraries of Spoken Documents - Dean Rehberger (Michigan State University, USA)

Friday, 12 July 2002
Preservation - Seamus Ross (University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK)
Video Digital Libraries - Scott Stevens (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

More about the program with some links to the presentations here.

Day 1

Introduction to Digital Library

Gary Marchionini (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)

Gary's definition:

"Digital libraries are the logical extentions and augmentations of the physical libraries in the electronic information society.
Extensions amplify existing resources and services and augmentations enable new kinds of human problem solving and expression.
(Marchionini, 1998. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, Vol. 63)"

The research in Digital Libraries is focused on 4 areas:

Technology: the infrastructure (network and storage for ex.), indexing and retrieval, interfaces (like a GUI) and software engineering (the DL architecture)
Community: how DL could change the practice of working and learning, Intellectual Property, Information Security
Content: for ex. selection of the content to preserve and preservation of the content from obsolescence of the storage medium.
Services: how to provide the user with effective access to the information.

As a Digital Library augmentation the author proposes the Sharium, or "A virtual workspace with rich content and powerful tools where people can work independently or collaborate with each other to learn and solve information problems. A collaborative problem solving environment:

organized around resources and tools
Encourages contributions and partecipatgion
Is sustainable

"
Gary Marchionini is responsible for the Open Video Project, a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities (www.open-video.org)

Metadata

Thomas Baker (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Germany)

The Library world has defined his own rules for cataloging purposes: MARC/AACR2, RAK. This can be considered as metadata trying to cover all user needs for all types of works (books, films) and it is pretty complex (an human action is required to create the metadata). At the other end of the complexity scale is the keyword search like google, less specific but less time-consuming to create, whereas Dublin Core Metadata initiative holds an intermediate position.

Based on DC is the Open Archives Initiative, whose philosophy is to encourage Digital Libraries to expose the metadata (encoded with unqualified DC to avoid too much encoding effort for the DL) about their collections so that service providers can harvest this metadata to discover resources and make services available to users. The OAI defines a simple protocol for metadata harvesting that works like an universal language between data providers and service providers.

Day 2

Geospatial Digital Libraries

Terry Smith (University of California at Santa Barbara, USA)

The lecturer presented the Alexander Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT), an application providing a distributed Digital Library for georeferenced information. The talk was pretty focused on the internals of the project.

Digital Libraries in Health Applications

Judith Klavans (Columbia University, USA)

A digital library regarding health application has to deal with problems all DL have, like many collections with different annotations (metadata), content strongly multilingual, no well-defined vocabulary of terms, plus issues like privacy because the information relate to persons.

Judith's project is called PERSIVAL, which stands for PErsonalized Retrieval and Summarization of Image, Video And Language Resource (http://www.cs.columbia.edu/diglib/PERSIVAL/).
This is (or will be) a farly complex system that allows users and doctors to query a broad range of multimedia health information. They use Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Bases and Text Mining to extract important data, and they also generate summaries of the retrieved data.

It can be interesting for us to know that they also deal with presentation issues.

Day 3

Digital Music Libraries

Jon Dunn (Indiana University, USA)

Jon presented his application VARIATIONS (http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/variations/), a digital library of music sound recordings and musical scores used primarily as support to teach courses, e.g. listening assignments for students and in-class presentation of examples.

Day 4

Digital Libraries in the Humanities

Gregory Crane (Tufts University, USA)

Controversial figure that divided the audience in we-love-you (few) and we-hate-you (many). The talk was a general one and no specific application-oriented aspect was treated, and this is one of the critics made by the we-hate-you part; on the other hand the lecturer spent some time in depicting Digital Library as a very important player in democracy, because of the fact they make knowledge accessible to all people (quote: "Access to cultural heritage of humanity is a right, not a priviledge"). Furthermore, he argued the fact users always embrace the "Don't let me think" principle and that users are always right.
To some all this sounded too pretentious and said to get the standing ovation, while others (including my old left-wing heart) were pretty warmed up by his words.

Gregg's project is called Perseus and it is an evolving digital library of resources for the study of the ancient world and beyond (see here).

Digital Libraries of Spoken Documents

Dean Rehberger (Michigan State University, USA)

The lecturer presented his project, Historical Voices (http://www.historicalvoices.org/), a fully searchable online database of spoken word collections spanning the 20th century (still under development).

Day 5

Preservation

Seamus Ross (University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK)

I was not there. The link to the presentation is here. Shortly, preservation deals with the issue of making digital data permanently accessible, regardless of the change in the technology that created it.

Video Digital Libraries

Scott Stevens (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

I was not there. The link to the presentation is here.

General Remarks

The Summer School was a good opportunity for me to gain knowledge about the Digital Library world. All in all I think that the subject is more interesting because of the mission and the vision (make knowledge accessible to people) than for the technical challanges it poses, at least what concerns our group research activity.
Two aspects that could be beneficial in one way or another to our research activity are:

Digital Libraries expose a huge collections of "items" that we can use for our presentations; moreover, their metadata effort is very close to our metadata effort and both parties could thrive on each other's experience
Some DL applications need a way to present their multimedia content to the users, and we could provide our expertise in this field.

All in all, I got the impression the DL arena is a vivid place and interesting to keep an eye on, both from a strategic and a research point of view.

This second Summer School, and from what I heard the first one as well, suffered a bit from the fact the audience was roughly composed by two different communities, the Librarians and the Computer Scientists, with different interests and backgrounds.

I will save you the usual comments on the food and the weather in Pisa, while for my comments on the Pisan nightlife and sex between attendees I have to first install a pay-per-view system on my PC.

Comments by Lynda

Actually, you had some very good speakers.

Gary Marchionini and Gregory Cane are very good, highly experienced researchers.  Perseus I know from "back in the old Hypertext days" (see the dates on the CD's). They took SGML seriously way back then - when HyperCard was new and cool.

http://www.open-video.org looks highly relevant for us too.
(Joost and Suzanne - had you looked at it in conjunction with the ECDL work?)

Shame you missed Scott Stevens (was that because you were setting up the pay per view system?).  He gave an overview of MM you were looking for.

You mentioned the dichotomy between librarians and computer scientists.  It is this that makes the field interesting.  The same with the hypertext "community" - it has been a mix of technies and literati.  Our problem (as a research group) is that we want a similar mix with multimedia (artists?) and computer scientists, but the group doesn't really exist.  (End of sermon.)

Looks like a very information-packed week.

     Lynda

Second DELOS International Summer School on Digital Library Technologies ISDL 2002 8-12 July 2002, Pisa, Italy