DLI at a glance

These projects deal with information capture, storage, retrieval, and display. The best place to keep abreast of them is through their Web sites. To read more about the projects or related research, see IEEE Computer, May 1996 (http://www.computer.org/pubs/ computer/computer.htm), or D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org). The first issue of the International Journal of Digital Libraries (Springer Verlag) will be launched next month.

(1) University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) Digital Library Project.

Principal investigator: Robert Wilensky Summary: develop the technologies to access large, distributed collections of photographs, satellite images, videos, maps, documents, and "multivalent" documents" and to support work-centred digital information services Partners: University of California: Office of the President UC Berkeley: Division of Computer Science; School of Information Management and Systems; Office of Information Systems and Technology; Research Programme in Environmental Planning & Geographic Information Systems; California Agencies and Organisations: State of California; Department of Water Resources; Department of Fish and Game; California Environment Resources Evaluation System; California Resources Agency; California State Library; Sonoma County Library; San Diego Association of Governments; Shasta County Office of Education; Industrial Partners: Hewlett-Packard Corporation; Illustra; IBM Almaden; Philips Research; The Plumas Corporation; Ricoh California Research; Sun Microsystems; Xerox PARC.

Web site: http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/

(2) University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), The Alexandria Project: A Digital Library for Geographically-Referenced Materials Principal investigators: Terence R. Smith, Michael F. Goodchild Summary: to build an online, distributed digital library for geospatially referenced information, including maps, aerial photographs, satellite imagery, and catalogue records, which supports geographically defined queries.

Partners: Academic: University of California, Santa Barbara: State University of New York, Buffalo; University of Maine, Orono.

Corporate: ConQuest Software Inc.; Digital Equipment Corp; Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc.; E-Systems; Xerox Corporation.

Public: Library of Congress; St. Louis Public Library; US Geological Survey.

Web site: http://alexandria.sdc.ucsb.edu/

(3) Carnegie Mellon University: Informedia Principal investigators: Howard Wactlar, Takeo Kanade Summary: to establish a large, online digital video collection (over 1,000 hours) with full-content and knowledge-based search and retrieval.

Partners and associates: QED Communications, Pittsburgh PA; Bell Atlantic; Digital Equipment Corporation; Fairfax County Schools, VA; Intel Corporation; Microsoft Corporation; Telecom Italia; The Open University, UK; The Winchester Thurston School, Pittsburgh PA Web site: http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/

(4) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Federating repositories of scientific literature Principal investigator: Bruce Schatz Summary: to build a large collection of technical engineering and physics literature that can be searched effectively across multiple indexes with a single interface.

Primary partners: American Astronomical Society; American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; American Institute of Physics;American Physical Society; American Society of Agricultural Engineers; American Society of Civil Engineers; Electronic Book Technologies; Institution of Electrical Engineers; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; IEEE Computer Society; John Wiley & Sons; OpenText (search engine); SoftQuad (Panorama, an SGML viewer); Hewlett-Packard; Microsoft; Web site: http://www.grainger.uiuc.edu/dli/

(5) University of Michigan Digital Library Summary: to create a digital library architecture based on the notion of software "agents" (i.e. short programs dispatched by the server that execute tasks on the client) to be deployed initially in three settings: the university and public libraries, secondary school science classrooms, and space-science laboratories.

Principal investigators: Daniel E. Atkins, William P. Birmingham, Karen M. Drabenstott, Edmund H. Durfee, Randall L. Frank, C. Olivia Frost, George W.Furnas, Wendy P. Lougee, Elke A. Rundensteiner, Elliot Soloway, Amy J.Warner, Michael P. Wellman Web site: http://www.si.umich.edu/UMDL/

Equipment partners: Apple Computer; Eastman-Kodak; Hewlett-Packard; IBM; Sybase; Library partners; Ann Arbor Public Library; New York Public Library; School partners; Pioneer High School, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Community High School and Roberto Clemente Student Development Center, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Ann Arbor Public Schools Instruction Division; Stuyvesant High School. Publisher partners: McGraw-Hill; Elsevier Science; University Microfilm International (UMI); Encyclopedia Britanica Educational Corporation; Grolier's; Cambridge University Press; American Chemical Society.

(6) Stanford University Digital Libraries Project Principal investigators: Hector Garcia-Molina, Terry Winograd Summary: a series of five principal projects addressing aspects of interoperability over heterogeneous services and collections. They are built around the "InfoBus" protocol, which provides a uniform way to acess a variety of services and information sources through "proxies" acting as interpreters between the InfoBus protocol and the native protocol.

Corporate/industrial partners: Association for Computing Machinery; Bell Communications Research; Knight-Ridder Information (Dialog); Enterprise Integration Technologies; Hewlett-Packard Labs; Hitachi Corp.; Hughes Research Laboratory; Interconnect Technologies Corporation; Interval Research Corporation; MIT Press; O'Reilly and Associates; NASA Ames Advanced Interaction Media Group; NASA Ames Library; Naval Command, Control and Ocean Surveillance Center (NCCOSC); WAIS Inc; Xerox PARC.

Web site: http://Walrus.Stanford.EDU/diglib/