Call for papers: Digital Libraries: From Alexandria to YouTube and Wikipedia – Embedding Social Dynamics

Call for papers: Digital Libraries: From Alexandria to YouTube and Wikipedia – Embedding Social Dynamics

A special issue of International Journal of Digital Culture and Electronic Tourism

In the context of libraries, various emerging technologies such as Semantic Web and Web 2.0 can be viewed as an extension of existing metadata-intensive approaches to the concept of the “digital library”. Such an extension should be appreciated in two dimensions:
On the one hand, the Semantic Web builds on a common logics-based framework adapted to the Web, which eases technology adoption while preserving a strong commitment to a formal foundation for metadata
At the same time, the sharing of ontologies as public Web resources offers new opportunities for interoperability across institutional repositories (libraries, cultural heritage institutions and the like) and personal or organisational records.

In addition, the representation of information resources can be easily linked to metadata describing personal or group preferences, objectives or links, and even to personal relationships, as described by the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) framework.

These specific characteristics of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 approach conform to a paradigm for building library systems that go a step beyond the existing technological infrastructure.

Currently in the context of FP7 of European Commission’s ICTs Program, http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/, the Challenge 4, of Digital Libraries and Content sets, specific priorities:

"…In today’s society individuals and organisations are confronted with an ever-growing load and diversity of information and content, and with increasing demands for knowledge and skills. Coping with these demands requires progress in three closely related domains.

• First, content should be made available through digital libraries and its long-term preservation, accessibility and usability must be ensured.
• Second, we need more effective technologies for intelligent content creation and management, and for supporting the capture of knowledge and its sharing and reuse.
• Third, individuals and organisations have to find new ways to acquire, contribute and exploit knowledge, and thereby learn. The challenge, therefore, is to harness the synergies made possible by linking content, knowledge and learning; to make content and knowledge abundant, accessible, interactive and usable over time by humans and machines alike.
  

This should take into account current trends in content production and consumption and particularly the move from few-to-many to many-to- many models. Europe, with its unique cultural heritage and creative potential, is well placed to take advantage of this paradigm shift and to be a key actor in the knowledge economy. The research is expected to firmly establish digital libraries services as a key component of digital content infrastructures, allowing content and knowledge to be produced, stored, managed, personalised, transmitted, preserved and used reliably, efficiently, at low cost and according to widely accepted standards. The support of more personalised and collaborative services, particularly within self-organising communities, will lead to more creative approaches to content and knowledge production. Improvements are also expected in terms of the usability, accessibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness of the resulting methods, technologies and applications with respect to large amounts of data and concurrent users]…"

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Semantic Web approaches to digital libraries
• Web 2.0 and social web approaches to digital libraries
• Collaborative/community annotations of content in digital libraries
• Collaborative filtering
• Integration of digital libraries with knowledge management and technology enhanced learning systems
• Ontologies for cataloguing and retrieving digital resources
• Semantic Web-enabled resource retrieval in electronic libraries
• Managing catalogues through ontologies
• Approaches to annotation of resources and its cost
• Regulatory ontologies: implications for library management
• Scientific knowledge organisation and ontologies
• New roles and competencies of librarians in semantic, metadata-intensive institutions
• Concepts of digital libraries and digital documents
• System architectures, integration and interoperability
• Information organisation, search and usage
• Digital preservation
• Frameworks, technical architectures and reference models
• Evaluation of repository models
• Digital repositories and open access
• Workflows and dataflows
• Common and shared repository services
• Ingest and metadata capture
• Automated metadata creation
• Policy and organisational issues
• Trust, audit and certification, authenticity, validation
• Rights management

Important Dates

1-2 Page Abstract: 30 March 2007
Submission of manuscripts: 15 June 2007
Notification to authors: 15 July 2007
Final versions due: 25 September 2007