Series of Workshops on Digital Library Foundations

A workshop on "Foundations of Digital Libraries" was held in connection with the ACM IEEE JCDL 2007 Conference in June in Vancouver. The workshop was organized by Donatella Castelli (Italian National Research Council, ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy) and Ed Fox (Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA), and it was the first one dedicated to this fascinating theme, which has gained increasing interest in recent years. Although digital libraries (DL) as a field dates back many years, it is not surprising that DL researchers feel the need for foundations for the field. The DL universe has experienced continued growth over the last fifteen years and has become a very complex one, producing diverse models and systems. Now DL researchers have become aware that foundations are urgent, since the results of their various DL projects are difficult to compare and even harder to combine and reuse to produce enhanced outcomes.