[12090] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Digital Libraries & Data Services Workshop
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (wbainbri@nsf.gov)
Mon Mar 23 21:16:40 1998
Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1998 18:39:40 -0600
From: wbainbri@nsf.gov
To: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
The workshop looks useful, and also possibly relevant to the Digital
Library Initiative. In case you are not familiar with that funding
opportunity, I have attached some information below.
Best wishes, Bill Bainbridge, NSF
=========================================
Social and behavioral scientists should be aware of new Digital
Library Initiative just announced by the National Science Foundation
and other federal agencies. Proposal due dates for this competition
are July 15, 1998 and May 17, 1999. Letters of intent are due April
15, 1998 for the FY 1998 competion and February 15, 1999 for the FY
1999 competition.
The NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
contributed core funding to the earlier phase of the Digital Library
Initiative, and expects to increase its support in this new phase.
Thus, research that applies digital library technology to the goals of
the social and behavioral sciences is encouraged, and well as research
that examines the social, economic, legal and ethical implications of
the new computing and communications technologies. The full
announcement can be found at:
http://www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/start.htm
or
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1998/nsf9863/nsf9863.htm
The announcement contains links to websites for NSF's partner
agencies. The introduction to that announcement follows:
"Innovative digital libraries research and applications will be
jointly supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National
Library of Medicine (NLM), the Library of Congress (LoC), the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Endowment
for the Humanities (NEH) and others. This announcement describes the
goals and features of Digital Libraries Initiative - Phase 2 (DLI-2),
with particular attention on NSF interests and requirements. More
detailed information on the domain-specific interests of the
partnering agencies may be obtained from them. Within NSF, DLI-2 is
administered by the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems
(IIS) of the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and
Engineering (CISE). Supporting Directorates include the Directorate
for Education and Human Resources and the Directorate for Social,
Behavioral and Economic Sciences. Contacts for these and related
activities at other agencies are referenced at the end of this
announcement.
"The current effort extends the joint NSF/DARPA/NASA 'Research on
Digital Libraries Initiative'. Since announcement of that initiative,
digital libraries research and applications efforts have proliferated;
new communities of researchers, information providers and users have
become engaged; the definition of a digital library has evolved;
technologies have advanced; stores of digital content have increased
dramatically; and new research directions have emerged. These advances
point to a future in which vast amounts of digital information will be
easily accessible to and usable by large segments of the world's
population.
"To help achieve this, the Digital Libraries Initiative - Phase 2
plans to:
* Selectively build on and extend research and testbed activities in
promising digital libraries areas;
* Accelerate development, management and accessibility of digital
content and collections;
* Create new capabilities and opportunities for digital libraries to
serve existing and new user communities, including all levels of
education;
* Encourage the study of interactions between humans and digital
libraries in various social and organizational contexts.
"Electronic information is being created by many people and data
gathering instruments in many forms and formats, stored in many
repositories around the world, and becoming increasingly
interconnected via electronic networks. Digital libraries research is
faced with the challenge of applying increasing computational capacity
and network bandwidth to manage and bring coherence, usability, and
accessibility to very large amounts of distributed complex data and
transform it into information and knowledge. Since digital libraries
are meant to provide intellectual access to stores of information,
research in this initiative is concerned with developing concepts,
technologies and tools to gain use of the fuller knowledge and meaning
inherent in digital collections. For example, for users this means
intelligent search, retrieval, organization and presentation tools and
interfaces; for content and collections providers this means new
information types, structures, document encoding and metadata for
enhancing context; for system builders this means designing hardware
and software systems capable of interpreting and implementing users'
requests by locating, federating and querying collections to provide
the user with the structured information sought."
Information about the previous multi-agency digital library
competition and its results can be found at the following URL, which
also provides access to a diversity of information about digital
libraries:
http://www.dlib.org/
You can also consult the report of a workshop: "Distributed Knowledge
Work Environments: Digital Libraries:"
http://www.si.umich.edu/SantaFe/
We ordinarily think of libraries as repositories for books and
periodicals, but really any kind of digital data collection of use to
scientists might qualify. One of the existing digital library
projects was concerned primarily with television programs, for
example, whereas another focused on maps. We could imagine an
anthropological or archaeological digital library devoted to
representations of artifacts. Another possibility is a library
devoted to social psychological experiments: containing everything
from software for running experiments on-line to raw data from
previous studies linked to publications based on them. Last October,
NSF supported a "NetLab" workshop exploring the potential for
large-scale Internet-based experiments on social and economic
exchange:
www.uiowa.edu/~grpproc/netlab.htm
NSF also has its own special competition, parallel to the Digital
Library Initiative but less narrowly focused, called "Knowledge and
Distributed Intelligence" (KDI). Social scientists who use advanced
computing and communications technology in their research, or who
study the development and impacts of this technology, should consider
submitting research proposals. Two submission deadlines have been set
so far: May 8, 1998 and February 1, 1999. The announcement can be
found at:
http://www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/start.htm
or
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/kdi/
KDI is divided into three components, and the "Knowledge Networking"
component is probably closest to Digital Libraries. The following
three workshops sketch the scope of that area:
Knowledge Networking Processes:
http://www.lrsm.upenn.edu/lrsm/KNP.html
Distributed Heterogeneous Knowledge Networks:
http://www.scd.ucar.edu/info/KDI/
Human Dimensions of Knowledge Networking:
http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/workshops/NSF/
Social and behavioral scientists considering submitting to either the
Digital Library or Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence competitions
are urged to examine the information on the web, then contact the NSF
program officers who represent their scientific disciplines. General
questions concerning the opportunities for social and behavioral
science in the Digital Library Initiative can be addressed to:
William Sims Bainbridge
Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sber/sociol/start.htm wbainbri@nsf.gov
