Extending Interoperability of Digital Libraries:
Building on the Open Archives Initiative

Background Information

• Open Archives Initiative
• Related Workshop Associated with ACM DL'2000, June 3

Duration

Audience/Participants

1. an email proposal of not more than 1000 words (half on what a person can contribute to the meeting topics and half on their background/prior work);
2. involvement in European digital library activities; and
3. prior involvement in the Open Archives initiative.

We expect 20-40 participants. There are over 30 applicants already for the June 3 workshop to be held in San Antonio, TX, USA on June 3 just prior to ACM DL'2000. The following attended the Santa Fe meeting and will be encouraged to join this workshop as well:

• Caroline Arms - Library of Congress
• Les Carr - University of Southampton & CogPrints
• Eric Celeste - MIT
• Mark Doyle - the American Physical Society
• Dale Flecker - Harvard University
• Edward Fox - Virginia Tech & NDLTD
• Mike Friedman - HighWire Press
• Paul Ginsparg - Los Alamos National Laboratory & arXiv.org
• Paul Gherman - Vanderbilt University (representative of ARL and Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
• Stevan Harnad - University of Southampton & CogPrints
• Thomas Krichel - University of Surrey & RePEc
• Carl Lagoze - Cornell University
• Rick Luce - Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Clifford Lynch - Coalition for Networked Information
• Kurt Maly - Old Dominion University
• Deanna Marcum - the Council on Library and Information Resources
• Michael Nelson - NASA Langley
• John Ober - University of California
• Heath O'Connell - Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
• Bob Parks - Washington University & EconWPA
• Herbert Van de Sompel - University of Ghent & Los Alamos National Laboratory
• Eric Van de Velde - Caltech
• Simeon Warner - Los Alamos National Laboratory & arXiv.org
• Don Waters - The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• Ken Weiss - University of California

Theme

This workshop will continue and extend the work of the first meeting of the initiative, that was held October 21-22, 1999 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. A similar workshop will be held on June 3, 2000, in between Hypertext'2000 and Digital Libraries'2000. However, it is important for there to be a series of meetings, and for some to occur in Europe.

Purpose and Goals

• disseminate results from the Santa Fe meeting
• review progress toward Open Archives, i.e., give a concise post mortem of progress to-date
• provide a forum for presentation and discuss of proposals to extend early work toward Open Archives

Expected Outcomes

• new protocols
• new service definitions
• Lecture Notes in Computer Science paper(s)
• suggested research agenda for interoperability

Relevance to the Field

• Interoperability is a major focus in the digital libraries field.
• A substantive part of the usage of digital libraries is likely to be in connection with good collections that afford free access.

Activities

• The day will be a mix of short presentations and discussions.
• There may be a period of 60-90 minutes in the afternoon for breakout sessions followed by 30 minutes of plenary presentation if the attendance warrants.

Topical Outline

• Morning
  • Review of the meeting in Santa Fe and the ACM DL'2000 workshop
  • Report and discussion on metadata efforts
  • Report and discussion on protocol and server efforts
  • Report and discussion on harvesting
  • Report and discussion on integrated services
  • Other business of the Open Archives initiative
• Afternoon
  Presentation of proposals for layers, protocols and services browsing, federation, linking, logging, multilingual access, preservation, visualization
  • Discussion of data quality and data cleaning
  • Discussion of extensions to other "super-archives"
  • Where do we go from here ...

Organizers

Carl Lagoze, Digital Library Scientist
Department of Computer Science, Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853 USA
Phone: +1-607-255-6046
FAX: +1-607-255-4428
E-Mail: lagoze@cs.cornell.edu
WWW: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/lagoze/lagoze.html

Herbert Van de Sompel
Head of Library Automation - University of Ghent - Belgium
Research Assistant - Research Library Los Alamos National Laboratory
tel +1-505-667-9233 (when in US)
herbert.vandesompel@rug.ac.be

Hussein Suleman
Department of Computer Science
660 McBryde Hall
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061 USA
tel +1-540-231-3615
hussein@vt.edu

Comments on organizers:
Fox, Lagoze and Van de Sompel were involved in the Santa Fe meeting and are actively working on the Open Archives initiative. Suleman is a PhD student working with Fox; his research focus is on this and closely related topics. He is funded by NSF to work on developing a "super-archive" related to WWW logs and research in that field.
Fox has organized a large number of workshops at ACM conferences as well as served as program chair for ACM DL'96 and '99. Formerly he was vice chair and then chair of ACM SIGIR, for the period 1988-1995.
Lagoze is one of the lead technical contributors to the Open Archives initiative. He has directed a number of digital library projects and has been an active participant in many workshops and conferences.
Van de Sompel has led much of the Open Archives effort, including a large portion of the work before and after the Santa Fe meeting.
Others from the Open Archives initiative are likely to play key roles in this workshop, so the list of organizers is subject to change.