Countries & Regions: 

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• United States of America: In the US, NSF, NASA and ARPA have funded six important Digital Library efforts, called the DLI (Digital Libraries Initiative). These programs each involve a large consortium of cooperating institutions but the six main ones are : University of California at Berkeley, University of Santa Barbara, University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellom University, Stanford University, and the University of Illinois.

 
• University of California at Berkeley: Image content queries along with Xerox PARC, database extraction from documents, multivalent documents, NLP. Headed by Robert Wilensky.
• University of Michigan: Scalability and Education. They are also investigating the use of agent architectures for Digital Libraries and trying to merge DLI with their other digital library efforts such as JSTOR and TULIP. Headed by Dan Atkins.
• University of Illinois: Concentrating of using scientific journals as their base collection with diversity in both documents as well as publishers, making the transition process from SGML to HTML smoother, defining semantic spaces. Headed by Bruce Schatz.
• Stanford University: concentration is on the infrastructure development such as bas networking and databases to support digital libraries. Also concerned with interoperability between deifferent digital library projects. Headed by Hector Garcia-Molina.
• University of California at Santa Barbara: spatial indexing and retrieval , image processing. Headed by Terry Smith.
• Carnegie Mellon University: digital video, image analysis, speech recognition, face recognition, natural language understading. Headed by Michael Mauldin and Marvin Sirbu.
Other than DLI, many research projects are underway at some other universities such as Virginia Tech and Texas A&M. In the near future, extensive funds are expected to be allocated for Digital Libraries.

The Library of Congress, under James Billington is digitizing 5 million of its items in a massive $60 million effort. Other universities involved in related projects are Georgia Tech, Cornell, MIT, University of Tennessee, Washington and California and Virginia Tech (known for the Envision system of Ed Fox). Other limited efforts include University of Virginia, University of Georgia and Columbia University.
 
 

• United Kingdom: Though efforts are still limited to penny-pockets, 20 million pounds have been set aside fro digital library projects. The program originally called FIGIT, now known as E-LIB funded 35 projects. Work includes ctaloguinf of archives, digitization of documents and data sharing. Some of the more notable efforts are : Digitizing the Burney collection of pre-1800 newspapers and scanning of Batley News, the CAntersbury Tales project that involves scanning all pre-1500 manuscripts and some ohe similar projects. However, the most notable is the Electronic Beowulf project which is a US/UK collaboration between Kevin Kiernan (University of Kentucky), Paul Szarmach (Western Michigan University) and the British Library.
  
  
• France: Work includes some scanning of old manuscripts with the most notable being the Tresor de la Langue Francaise project at the University of Nancy. The French, along with the Japanese are also leaders in the Group 7 project which is a museum project. Other efforts are INIST and FOUDRE (1989 to 1992) followed by EDIL and ELITE.
  
  
• The EU: The European Union funds a large number of international efforts in digital libraries. (Please see page 255 of Michal Lesk's book for details)
  
  
• Japan: Japan is involved in some digitization and cataloguing efforts and has a $50M project on. They are also working on modern document delivery and OCR.
  
  
• Australia: Australia has recently made a modest effort to enter into digital library research. They are planning some digitization projects with a $10M (Australian) digitization project on the anvil.They are also interested in digitizing Aborigine scriptures and paintings.
  
  
• Elsewhere: Many other countries are involved in digital library research on much smaller scales. Notable amongst them are Canada, Singapore, Korea and China.

 

NOTE 2: See also the table pointing to various national digital libraries from April 1998 CACM online pages