Second summit on international cooperation in digital libraries

Abstract

AGENDA for Summit The agenda for the First Summit -which will serve as the starting point for the Second -was as follows: One of the workshops to be held at Digital Libraries 1999 will be the Second Summit on International Cooperation in Digital Libraries. This workshop follows in the footsteps of the very successful "First Summit" held at close of DL98 in Pittsburgh, PA -June 27/28. That meeting brought together 17 researchers, practitioners, and librarians from twelve countries: Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Korea, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the United States. The Call for the First Summit, as well as the Report describing its results can be located via ks.com/idla. The text below is a synopsis of that report -and is indicative of our ambitions for the Second Summit. 1. Is international cooperation on digital libraries necessary, and why? 2. What are the truly important benefits of digital libraries and how might they be realized -specifically by international cooperation -while at the same time not being oversold via a never-ending series of grandiose pronouncements? 3. What goals should be set for international cooperation? Who should set them. And how might a critical mass of effort be accumulated to make timely progress? The Summit was motivated by several common beliefs among the attendees. First, that digital libraries are destined for a bright future -indeed, as the Call for the Summit put it: "Digital Libraries will likely figure amongst the most important and influential institutions of the 21st Century". Not only will future digital libraries dramatically improve access to the world’s knowledge, but they will also act as "collaboratories" out of which new knowledge is crafted and refined by widely-distributed teams and organizations -knowledge that right from conception is fully interconnected with previous work. 4. What organizational mechanisms are appropriate for fostering international cooperation? What other models of internation cooperation have worked and not worked? 5. How will all the cooperating ’participants’ benefit -so that the effort invested is a win-win for all?" 6. What specific programs and projects should be undertaken, and how can these avoid fragmentation and oneupmanship? 7. How can results be achieved in graduated, incremental steps -versus attempting the ’ever-deadly’ quantum leaps. A second shared belief was that daunting challenges stand in the way of achieving this vision. The difficulties of facing these challenges -to build useable, scaleable, and sustainable digital libraries that interoperate on a global scale -will surely demand genuine collaboration from researchers in many disciplines, as well as substantial commitments from imaginative and resourceful practitioners. 8. What is a realistic time frame for achieving these goals so that unachievable expectations are not spawned in the first place? What might be demonstrable (and heartening) progress in the interim? [An example, might be designing a new school from the ground-up using digital library technology as a hub. In such a school it might be that students who ’teach’ the results of their research -just as they will ’produce’ in future life.] The third stepping stone in this series of beliefs was the acknowledgement that central to addressing these questions and achieving the "grand goals" of this field will be non-trivial cooperation at the international level -in all its various forms. Like the task of building an international space station, building an international federation of digital libraries -powerful enough to "keep the mind humming" -will require extensive cooperation among the best minds in the field. 9. What levels of government funding is needed? How should that funding be sourced? Among what objectives should that funding be allocated and how? 10. How will the digital library paradigm be respectful of, but made part of everyday activity -especially across international boundaries? 11. What should be done next -following this Summit and who will do it? Should you read this prior to the Second Summit -to be held on 14 August 1999 -please feel free to join us! Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. DL 99, Berkeley, CA USA Copyright ACM 1999 1-58113-145-3/99/08 . . . $5.00 267