Digital Libraries 99: Fourth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries

Missingham, Roxanne, Australian Academic & Research Libraries

Berkeley 11-14 August 1999

ACM (the Association of Computer Machinery) is an organisation whose Digital Libraries conferences provide the opportunity for computer scientists, HCI researchers and librarians to come together. Over 120 attended the conference this year, coming from a wide range of countries including Lapland, New Zealand, Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany. I was the only Australian attending. ACM primarily serves computer scientists, with librarians involved often concentrating more on information retrieval issues. The technical aspects of building and retrieving information from digital libraries focused on computer issues, rather than service issues or digital reference. The computing emphasis was evident in the unusual use of language, for example one speaker talked of searching for items with `topicality relatedness' rather than `on the same subject'.

Four strong themes emerged from the presentations and posters: understanding the purpose and delivering digital libraries; user needs and evaluation; innovative projects (particularly in music); and sustainable funding models (including the National Science Foundation and DARPA). The major commercial digital libraries, such as Westlaw, Lexis/Nexis, ISI, Elsevier, High wire, Silverplatter, Dialog, JSTOR, were not represented in papers presented. This was unfortunate as Westlaw in particular has recently developed some online legal teaching systems that would have been very relevant, and all would have provided case studies of very large digital libraries in a production environment.

Purpose of Digital Libraries and their Establishment

David Levy, of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, gave the opening address to the conference, `Digital libraries and the problem of purpose'. …

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Publication information: Article title: Digital Libraries 99: Fourth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries. Contributors: Missingham, Roxanne - Author. Journal title: Australian Academic & Research Libraries. Volume: 30. Issue: 3 Publication date: September 1999. Page number: 219. © 2007 Australian Library and Information Association. COPYRIGHT 1999 Gale Group.

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