IJCAI-97 Workshop on AI in Digital Libraries
Moving from Chaos to (more) Order, August 24 1997, Nagoya, Japan
Innes A. Ferguson
Zuno Ltd.
Agents Systems Group
4th Floor, International House,
Ealing Broadway Centre, London W5 5DB, UK
innes@zuno.com
The IJCAI-97 Workshop on AI and Digital Libraries was held in Nagoya, Japan, on Sunday, August 24 1997, as part of the Workshop Program of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). The purpose of the workshop, as outlined in the original Call for Papers, was to identify and highlight ways in which AI techniques could contribute to solving some of the challenges of building real world digital libraries, and was intended to build upon the successes of earlier IJCAI and AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) workshops on information access and navigation. Following on from the many useful AI techniques and approaches presented at these venues, the main aim of the workshop was to focus on how such techniques might be applied in the context of digital libraries.
For the purposes of the workshop, and borrowing from the CNI White Paper on Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval, a digital library was defined to be an electronic information access system offering users a coherent view of a selected, organized, and managed body of information. As interest increases in heterogeneous, information-rich repositories - arguably, proto-digital libraries - such as the Internet and intranets, a number of technical challenges will need to be met to satisfy individual users' demands. Key among these are information discovery and retrieval, user interface design, classification and indexing, content delivery and presentation, storage management and administration, scalability, and interoperability. Faced with such challenges, a number of international agencies (most noticeably NSF, NASA, and DARPA in the United States, and JIPDEC [Japanese Information Processing Development Center] in Japan) have recently made available substantial funding for digital library research. AI researchers are among those participating in such large-scale digital library initiatives.
Particular questions that the workshop participants were asked to address included: How easily do AI techniques for general information repositories, such as the WWW, migrate to the more structured domains of digital libraries? What other AI techniques (eg. knowledge representation, machine learning) can assist in improving access to and management of digital information? and What new challenges and opportunities do real world digital libraries bring to bear on AI research? Specific topics of interest that were listed in the Call for Papers included:
Nine reviewed papers plus one invited talk were accepted for presentation at the workshop. The invited talk was titled Next Generation Digital Library Program in Japan and was presented by Hiroshi Mukaiyama, a senior researcher at JIPDEC, the Japanese Information Processing Development Center. In his talk, Hiroshi described the organization and scope of the 5-year national digital library initiative in Japan. Details on this project can be found here. The following papers (Postscript versions of which can be downloaded) were presented:
All in all, the workshop was very productive and informative. There was a lot of interesting discussion concerning the various pieces of presented work, as well as a reasonable level of information and knowledge sharing among the people present. At this time, there are no concrete plans to follow up with a second workshop on AI in Digital Libraries (participants will be polled to establish the level of interest in this idea); however, arrangements have commenced to publish expanded versions of a selection of the workshop papers in Springer Verlag's International Journal on Digital Libraries (JODL). This special issue on AI in Digital Libraries will be guest edited by Innes Ferguson and Ed Durfee and will likely appear in early 1998. A Call for Papers for this issue will be published in the near future.
Rob Kling and Howard Rosenbaum of Indiana University are organizing a Workshop on "Advances in Organizational and Social Informatics" with National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsorship. The workshop, with 25 invited active researchers, will be held in Bloomington, Indiana (at Indiana University) on November 9-11, 1997. The main purposes of this workshop are to (1) identify the state of knowledge about Organizational and Social Informatics; (2) identify productive directions for new studies; and (3) help forge a research community.
Social Informatics is a relatively new term to refer to the bodies of knowledge about information technologies and social change that are variously found under labels such as "social impacts of computing," "social design," and "implementation studies" (see http://www.slis.indiana.edu/SI). The movement has emerged from a series of lively conversations that began in early 1996among scholars with an interest in advancing research about the social aspects of computerization. They were concerned that the diversity of labels for social studies of information technologies impeded disciplinary and cross-disciplinary communication about important research results and theories. Like the name "Human Computer Interaction", the name "Social Informatics" serves as a banner to organize people who conduct research in the field and as a pointer to a body of research that could help information professionals, such as those who are interested in having digital libraries (DLs) effectively support particular communities.
Organizational Informatics is a sub-area of Social Informatics. Findings and theories belong to Organizational Informatics when they can be characterized primarily in terms of the participants of specific organizations. Using this criterion, our understandings of the adoption, use, and impacts of groupware fall well within Organizational Informatics. In contrast, the Internet is used by millions of people outside of their work lives, and the character and consequences of the public's use of the Internet is a topic outside of Organizational Informatics, but within Social Informatics. Studies of the social scale use and social roles of digital libraries also fit within, or can be informed by, Social Informatics.
Some of the key Organizational and Social Informatics research areas include:
There is a notable body of systematic research about each of these topics. But it is scattered across the journals and conferences of several disciplines including computer science, information science, information systems, and various social sciences.
For additional information about Social Informatics, see the Social Informatics home page, at: http://www.slis.indiana.edu/SI For additional information about the Workshop on "Advances in Organizational and Social Informatics" contact Professor Rob Kling:
Center for Social Informatics
School of Library and Information Science
10th and Jordan
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405-1801
http://php.ucs.indiana.edu/~kling
812-855-9763 Fax: 812-855-6166
The Art Museum Image Consortium: Licensing Museum Digital Documentation for Educational Use
J. Trant and D. Bearman, Archives & Museum Informatics[1]
On September 22, more than twenty of the largest art museums in the USA and Canada, including the two national galleries, will form the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO). An initiative of the Association of Art Museum Directors, AMICO will enable educational access to cultural heritage information by creating and licensing a collective digital library of images and documentation of works in museum collections. Its foundation reflects the commitment of museums to an emerging new educational opportunity.[2]
The founding of AMICO follows discussions earlier this year, that defined mechanisms for the creation of a multimedia digital library documenting and interpreting museum collections. The agreements that frame the operation of AMICO (see http://www.amn.org/AMICO) are articulated at the level of values and objectives and define the operation of the Consortium and the licenses it will offer.
Access to the documentation held in museum collections has long been a problem, but what was an irritation in traditional scholarship has become a bottleneck in the networked educational environment.[3] The digitized text, images, audio tours and multimedia being created in museums provide a rich source of content for on-line curriculum. Interest in the use of non-traditional sources is growing as technologies finally enable their reproduction and integration.[4] But the cultural heritage community has lacked the economic and distribution systems to support this use. Intellectual property frameworks have been in flux,[5] and Fair Use does not enable many desired educational applications. Museums have been without precedent or policy regarding new digital educational uses, and some have been reluctant to grant rights at all.[6]
A not-for profit Consortium that licenses the content of museums collectively is the most effective means of distributing digital information to the educational community. Membership enables museums to do a number of things they cannot do on their own, including:
Collaborating in AMICO reduces risks for individual museums through collective decision-making, common standards and guidelines and shared expertise. Income supports services which enable members to contribute to the shared Library. These may include:
1) Technology Information: "best practice" guidelines, "frequently asked questions", standards for data capture, advice on hardware and software, application guidelines, training, research and liaison with standards developers.
2) Data Enhancement: data value standardization, unique identifiers, watermarking of images, subject indexing, metadata augmentation, thesaural explosion of terms in controlled vocabularies, markup of text to SGML, and mapping institutional data to export standards.
3) Catalog Management: creating an integrated, publicly accessible directory with many access points, so educators can identify works they have licensed and may use through AMICO, and the public can seek further rights (including commercial use) from individual museum members.
4) Rights Management: defining rights management data requirements, creating searchable rights systems, negotiating with individual rights holders and their collectives, writing model licensing agreements, developing terms of licenses for schools, school districts and public libraries, and drafting and disseminating user training materials.
5) Customer Services: monitoring and analyzing uses and users, identifying users needs, and promoting innovative educational uses of museum digital content.
6) Collaborative Partnering: developing liaisons with technology firms, funding sources, standards organizations, telecommunication providers, and others.
As a museum-owned collective, AMICO will be well positioned to collaborate with government sponsored agencies in Europe and elsewhere, following the example of sectors such as music.
Rather than fearing the simulacra of digital reproduction, museums are exploring the potential of digital technologies for developing increased familiarity with, and knowledge of the world's material culture.[7] In an era of shrinking budgets and challenges to the very existence of some national arts institutions, museums can make cultural resources relevant and accessible to educators and students. AMICO is the first step towards the creative use of these resources to illustrate and explore the Humanities. Its members are banking on the development of a visually and culturally literate public that feels an ownership of museum collections, as a consequence of having access to digital documentation in the course of their education.
[1]Archives &
Museum Informatics has been retained by the AAMD to facilitate
the planning and organisation of AMICO.
[7]Maxwell L. Anderson,
"Introduction", The Wired Museum, 1997, pp. 11-34.
A new book about electronic serials is scheduled to be published by Haworth Press
next spring. The book, a special issue of Serials Librarian, includes articles on a wide range of topics, including: publishing, pricing, copyright, acquisitions and collection
development, cataloging and metadata, preservation and archiving,
descriptions of various local/national/international projects, indexing,
uniform resource identifiers, and citation. For more information, including
abstracts of the articles, see the website at
<http://web.mit.edu/waynej/www/onlineserials.htm>, or contact the editor,
Wayne Jones, at waynej@mit.edu. The full-text of a few of the articles will
also be posted to the site over the next months.
Special Issue of Serials Librarian to be Devoted to Electronic Journals
Wayne Jones
Head of Serials Cataloging, MIT Libraries
Cambridge, Massachusetts
The
Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries (CIDL), which represents a new alliance of Canadian libraries interested in improving communication and coordination in the development of Canadian
digital library resources has been organized. It will provide a forum for:
1996 Electronic Records Conference Report University of Michigan, School of Information and The Bentley Historical Library |
http://www.si.umich.edu/e-recs/ |
1997 Survey Results Network Wizards |
http://www.nw.com/zone/WWW/report.html, |
Adding Intelligence to Digital
Libraries Floriana Esposito et al. |
http://www.dlib.com/people/innes/aiindl/papers/esposito.ps |
American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Fall 1997 Symposium October 25-29, 1997 Nashville, Tennessee |
http://www.amia.org/f97flyer.html |
Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) |
http://www.amn.org/AMICO |
Association of Information and Dissemination Centers (ASIDIC) Fall 1997 Meeting October 21-23, 1997 Seattle, Washington |
http://www.accessinn.com/seattl~1.htm |
Automated Query-relevant Summarization
and Diversity-based Reranking Jaime Carbonell |
http://www.dlib.com/people/innes/aiindl/papers/carbonell.ps |
Beyond Print: Scholarly Publishing and Communication in the Electronic Environment September 26-27, 1997 University of Toronto at Scarborough, Canada |
http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/EPub/agenda.html |
Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries | http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/cidl/ |
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) White Paper on Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval |
http://www.cni.org/projects/nidr/ |
Copyright Law in the Digital World: Fair Use, Education and Libraries after CONFU (The Conference on Fair Use) "Town Meeting" Reed College, Portland, Oregon September 27, 1997 |
http://oregon.uoregon.edu/~csundt/pdx.htm |
E-Serials (Serials Librarian) | http://web.mit.edu/waynej/www/onlineserials.htm |
Identifying and Tracking Changing Interests Barry Crabtree and Stuart Soltysiak |
http://www.dlib.com/people/innes/aiindl/papers/crabtree.ps |
Information Seeking in Context: An International Conference on Information Needs, Seeking and Use in Different Contexts August 13-15, 1998 Sheffield, UK |
http://panizzi.shef.ac.uk/david_allen/ISIC/isic.html |
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) Call for Papers |
http://www.dlib.com/people/innes/aiindl/cfp.html |
International Journal on Digital Libraries (JODL). |
http://cimic.rutgers.edu/jodl/ |
Japanese Information Processing Development Center (JIPDEC) |
http://www.gip.jipdec.or.jp/english/project-e/project27-e.html |
Metadata Summit: Meeting Report Research Libraries Group |
http://www.rlg.org/meta9707.html, |
Natural Language Processing for Session-based Information Retrieval Interface on the Web Geunbae Lee et al. |
http://www.dlib.com/people/innes/aiindl/papers/lee.ps |
Preferential Models of Refinement Paths in Query by Navigation Peter Bruza and B. van Linder |
http://www.dlib.com/people/innes/aiindl/papers/bruza.ps |
Regional Alliance for Preservation | http://www-cpa.stanford.edu/cpa/misc/rap/ |
Robustness and Scalability in
Digital Libraries: A Case for Agent-based Market Systems Innes Ferguson et al. |
http://www.dlib.com/people/innes/aiindl/papers/ferguson.ps |
Service Classification in a Proto-organic
Society of Agents Peter Weinstein and William Birmingham |
http://www.dlib.com/people/innes/aiindl/papers/weinstein.ps |
Smart Documents, Mobile Queries:
Information Provision and Retrieval using a Multi-agent System Steve Marsh |
http://www.dlib.com/people/innes/aiindl/papers/marsh.ps |
Social Informatics Home Page | http://www.slis.indiana.edu/SI |
Text Encoding Initiative: Tenth Anniversary User Conference November 14-16, 1997 Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island |
http://www.stg.brown.edu/webs/tei10/index.html |
Toward the Mediation of Semantic Gaps between Users and Digital Libraries Masanori Sugimoto et al. |
http://www.dlib.com/people/innes/aiindl/papers/sugimoto.ps"> |
USA Digital Libraries Initiative (NSF, NASA, and DARPA) |
http://www.cise.nsf.gov/iris/DLHome.html |
hdl:cnri.dlib/september97-clips