The Joint NSF/JISC International Digital Libraries initiative

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

And though not exactly on the topic of licensing, the following
announcement represents some exciting digital collaborations and deserves
wide distribution.   The Moderators

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 1999 09:14:17 -0400
From: Terry Kuny <Terry.Kuny@xist.com>
Reply-To: International Federation of Library Associations mailing list
    <IFLA-L@INFOSERV.NLC-BNC.CA>
Subject: The Joint NSF/JISC International Digital Libraries Initiative

Apologies for any cross-posting

Press Release

Friday 11 June 1999 

The Joint NSF/JISC International Digital Libraries Initiative

The National Science Foundation and the UK Joint Information Systems
Committee today (Friday 11 June 1999) released a joint statement
announcing the first 6 projects which have been recommended for funding
under the International Digital Libraries Initiative NSF/JISC Joint
Program.

Among the most exciting of opportunities offered by a global information
infrastructure are international digital libraries; - content-rich,
multimedia, multilingual collections created from globally distributed
resources by international groups engaged in collaborative efforts. While
there are now uncoordinated efforts in many countries, cooperative
programs of research and intellectual infrastructure development can help
avoid duplication of effort, prevent the development of fragmented digital
systems, and encourage productive interchange of scientific knowledge and
scholarly data around the world. The digital libraries area is one in
which all countries stand to gain from coordinated, cooperative
activities.

To begin to address some of the research challenges associated with
creating international digital libraries the Division of Information and
Intelligent Systems and the Division of International Programs of the
National Science Foundation issued a call for proposals in October 1998
for multi-country, multi-team projects involving at least one research
team in the United States and one in another country
(http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/1999/nsf996/nsf996.htm). The NSF would support
the US part of a joint project while the non-US parts needed to gain its
support from other sources. NSF wished to co-ordinate review with the
foreign funding agency and make joint decisions, when possible.

The UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) was the first to join
the NSF in this endeavour and issued a matching call (JISC Circular 15/98
- http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub98/c15_98.html). JISC has committed �500,000
per year for three years to fund new development work in this programme.
The NSF has committed a similar amount.

The JISC/NSF arrangement was opportune for both organizations. It allowed
NSF to broaden its traditional basic research focus, and JISC to draw on
and connect with, in a direct way, the large set of research activities
being sponsored under Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2. The joint
JISC/NSF projects are considered an integral part of this larger
multi-agency program.

Michael Lesk, Division Director of the National Science Foundation's
Division of Information and Intelligent Systems said, "The National
Science Foundation is very excited at this new step in international
scientific cooperation. We look on this as an example of the worldwide
advantages and synergies from which all countries will benefit."

Reg Carr, Director of University Library Services, University of Oxford
and Chair of the Joint Information Systems Committee's (JISC's) Committee
on Electronic Information said, "I am delighted with the joint programme
of bilateral digital projects which has been arranged by agreement between
the National Science Foundation and the JISC. The rigorous selection
process has led to a well-balanced range of projects which promise to
achieve much of mutual benefit for the US and the UK in the digital
library arena."

Six projects were recommended for funding, sharing a total of almost
$5million over the three year project term. The six joint projects are:
                -------------------------------

Cross-Domain Resource Discovery: Integrated Discovery and use of Textual,
Numeric and Spatial Data: University of California, Berkeley / University
of Liverpool.

The University of California, Berkeley and Special Collections and
Archives, the University of Liverpool Library are collaborating on a
project to enable cross-domain searching in a multi-database environment.
Their aim is to produce a next generation online information retrieval
system ("Cheshire") based on international standards that will facilitate
searching on the internet across collections of original materials,
printed books, records, archives, manuscripts, and museum objects),
statistical databases, full-text,geo-spatial, and multi-media data
resources.

                ------------------------------- 

HARMONY: Metadata for resource discovery of multimedia digital objects:
Cornell University / ILRT / DSTC

HARMONY, a three-way international partnership between Cornell University,
the Australian Distributed Systems Technology Centre and the University of
Bristol's Institute for Learning and Research Technology, will be devising
a framework to deal with the challenge of describing networked collections
of highly complex and mixed-media digital objects. The work will draw
together work on the RDF, XML, Dublin Core and MPEG-7 standards, and will
focus on the problem of allowing multiple communities of expertise (e.g.
library, education, rights management) to define overlapping descriptive
vocabularies for annotating multimedia content.

                -------------------------------

Integrating and Navigating Eprint Archives through Citation-Linking:  
Cornell University / Southampton University / Los Alamos National
Laboratory

In a 3-way partnership, Southampton University, Cornell University, and
the Los Alamos National Laboratory will hyperlink each of the over 100,000
papers in Los Alamos's unique online Physics Archive to every other paper
in the archive that it cites. It is hoped that the power of this
remarkable new way of navigating the scientific journal literature will
help induce authors in others fields to join to create interlinked online
archives like Los Alamos across disciplines and around the world.

                -------------------------------

Online Music Recognition and Searching (OMRAS): University of
Massachussetts / King's College, London

Online music recognition and searching (OMRAS) is led by King's College
London in partnership with the Center for Intelligent Information
Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts. OMRAS is a system for
efficient and user-friendly content-based searching and retrieval of
musical information from online databases stored in a variety of formats
ranging from encoded score files to digital audio. The overall goal of
this cross-disciplinary research is to fill a gap in the provision of
online facilities for musical collections: the inability to search the
content for 'music' itself.

                -------------------------------

Emulation options for digital preservation: technology emulation as a
method for long-term access and preservation of digital resources:
University of Michigan / CURL

A team of researchers at the University of Michigan and research staff in
the UK from the Cedars project, being run at the Universities of Leeds,
Oxford and Cambridge under the aegis of CURL (Consortium of University
Research Libraries) will investigate the potential role of emulation in
long-term preservation of information in digital form. The project will
develop and test a suite of emulation tools, evaluate the costs and
benefits of emulation as a preservation strategy for complex multi-media
documents and objects, and develop models for collection management
decisions about how much effort and resources to invest in exact
replication within preservation activity. The project team will assess
options for preserving the original functionality and 'look and feel' of
digital objects and develop preliminary guidelines for the use of
different preservation strategies (conversion, migration and emulation).

                -------------------------------

The IMesh Toolkit: An architecture and toolkit for distributed subject
gateways: University of Wisconsin-Madison / UKOLN /ILRT

Recent years have seen the emergence of the subject gateway approach to
Internet resource discovery and leading gateway initiatives have recently
been collaborating informally under the name IMesh. The IMesh Toolkit
project, a partnership of the UK Office for Library and Information
Networking at the University of Bath, the Institute for Learning and
Research Technology at the University of Bristol and the Internet Scout
Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, aims to advance the system
framework within which subject gateways and related services operate by
defining an architecture which specifies individual components and how
they communicate.

Notes for editors

The National Science Foundation is an independent U.S. government agency
responsible for promoting science and engineering through programs that
invest over $3.3 billion per year in almost 20,000 research and education
projects in science and engineering. URL: http://www.nsf.gov/

The Joint Information Systems Committee is funded by the four UK Higher
Education Funding Bodies to stimulate and enable the cost effective
exploitation of information systems and to provide a high quality national
network infrastructure for the UK higher education and research councils
communities. URL: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/

For further details of the NSF/JISC joint program contact:

Mr Stephen M. Griffin, Division of Information and Intelligent Systems
(IIS), Program Director: Special Projects, Digital Libraries Initiative,
National Science Foundation 4201 Wilson Boulevard, Room 1115, Arlington,
VA 22230 Phone: (703) 306-1930 Fax: (703) 306-0599 Email sgriffin@nsf.gov

Mr Chris Rusbridge, Programme Director, Electronic Libraries Programme,
The Library, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK Phone: 01203
524979 Fax: 01203 524981, Email C.A.Rusbridge@Warwick.ac.uk

Mr Norman Wiseman, JISC Head of Programmes, C35 Cherry Tree Buildings,
University of Nottingham, University Boulevard, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK
Phone: 0115 951 4790 Fax: 0115 951 4791 Email head.programmes@jisc.ac.uk

For further information about each of the projects contact:

Cross-domain resource discovery

Dr Paul Watry, Automated Projects Manager, Special Collections and
Archives University of Liverpool Library, PO Box 123,Liverpool L69 3DA, UK
Phone: +44 151 794 2696 Fax: +44 151 794 2681 Email:
P.B.Watry@liverpool.ac.uk

HARMONY

Mr Dan Brickley, Institute for Learning and Research Technology,
University of Bristol, 8-10 Berkeley Square, Bristol BS8 1HH, UK Phone:
+44 117 928 7096 Fax: +44 117 928 7112 Email:
daniel.brickley@bristol.ac.uk

ePrint Citation linking

Professor Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science, Department of
Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Highfield,
Southampton, SO17 1BJ UK Phone: +44 1703 592-582 Fax: +44 1703 592-865
email: harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk

OMRAS

Mr Tim Crawford, Music Department, King's College, Strand, London WC2R
2LS, UK Phone: +44 171 848 1821 Fax: +44 171 848 2326 Email:
t.crawford@kcl.ac.uk

Emulation options

Ms Kelly Russell, CEDARS Project Manager, Edward Boyle Library, University
of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK Phone: +44 113 233 6386 Fax: +44 113 233 5539
Email: k.l.russell@leeds.ac.uk

IMesh toolkit

Mr Andy Powell, UK Office for Library and Information Networking,
University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK Phone: +44 1225 323933 Fax: +44 1225
826838 Email: a.powell@ukoln.ac.uk


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