Introduction to the focused issue on the 20th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2016)

Valuable and rapidly increasing volumes of data are created or transformed into digital form by all fields of scientific, educational, cultural and governmental and industry activities. For this purpose, the digital libraries community has developed long-term and interdisciplinary research agendas, providing significant results, such as development of digital libraries, solving practical problems, accommodating research data and satisfying the needs of specific user communities. The advent of the technologies that enhance the exchange of information with rich semantics is of particular interest in the community. Information providers interlink their metadata with user-contributed data and offer new services out looking for the development of a web of data and addressing the interoperability and long-term preservation challenges. The 20th edition of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) held in Hannover, Germany, during September 5–9, 2016, had the general theme of “Overcoming the limits of Digital Archives” and focused on the major areas: “Connecting digital libraries,” “Practice of digital libraries,” “Digital libraries in science” and “Users, communities, and personal data.” In addition, specialized track on “Digital Humanities,” “eInfrastructures” and “Creativity and Multimedia Libraries” were presented. All submissions to the conference were independently reviewed on the basis of peer review process. A Senior Program Committee member subsequently coordinated a discussion among the reviewers. The selection stage that followed compared the paper evaluations and finalized the conference program. Eight papers with the highest score and