Traugott Koch, of NetLab/EULER, discusses the benefits of conferences with an interdisciplinary approach, and the opportunities to discuss and approach the problems concerning the big cooperative efforts. He notes that there is not enough done to mobilize new potential European partners for digital library efforts.
The Internet is an infrastructure which to a high degree offers the possibility and invites to international cooperation without regard to the location of the partners. For a considerable cooperation between projects, however, personal encounters are necessary and conferences, especially those with an interdisciplinary approach, offer good opportunities for a more in detail exploration of the options and aims and to l earn about and meet potential partners.
Conferences such as last year's 2nd European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (Heraklion, Crete) [1] seem in this respect to have taken a big step in the right direction. The originally strong connection to the Informatics and Computer Science community has been opened up to a certain degree to other disciplines involved in digital library efforts. That is not to say that the participation e.g. from the European library comunity could not be increased considerably. Accomplishing real interdisciplinarity in an evolving field is not easy and requires a lot of time and effort from all involved disciplines. The increase in international participation is gratifying to a degree that one would wish to see an effort to accomplish a broader European participation in this European conference. There might otherwise be a risk, that the participation remains very similar to the one in the other international digital library conferences (e.g. the ACM and the IEEE sponsored ones in the US or the conferences in Asia) and that there is not enough done to mobilize new potential European partners for digital library efforts.
For us, the participants from the European Union Telematics for Libraries project EULER [2], several interesting opportunities opened up during the conference in Heraklion, in addition to the many individual contacts and discussions in the context of our poster presentation. The working groups for EU and NSF cooperative action presented drafts for an international Digital Library research agenda in the following six areas: Metadata, Resource indexing and discovery in a globally distributed digital library, Interoperability, Intellectual property and economics and Multilingual information access [3].
The outcome of this work has been published as a Summary Report "An International Research Agenda for Digital Libraries" [4]. To our project, several of the metadata and indexing/searching issues are of high importance and we would very much like to see steps taken to joint research with US colleagues and to the creation of testbeds. In general, though, it didn't become clear to us, if there are any special financial support measures intended, to follow up those proposals. At the moment, there does not seem to be any plans from the EU's side to assign special funds for common efforts in this context.
For potential US partners, NSF recently (October 1998) published a support program for international cooperation in the digital library sector: "International Digital Libraries Collaborative Research" [5]. At least the first round had a very short time frame for project applications (closed January 15, 1999). This makes it hard to find partners and to write the application. A closer investigation shows, unfortunately, that only the participation of the US partners is funded by NSF. The additional treshold to find money to prepare the application and the funding for all our project work, seems far to high (at least in this short timeframe). It is not clear to us either how the process of reviewing such international projects would be carried out by our potential European and national funding bodies. Furthermore, how could US partners be involved in already running EU Telematics projects like ours? Would there be any additional money available for the extra tasks involved?
At the last ACM Digital Library Conference in Pittsburgh this summer we participated in a "Summit" meeting to prepare real efforts of well focused International Cooperation on Digital Libraries. Twelve countries were represented. An agreement on issues and organisational efforts was reached, a new organization "International Digital Libraries Association" [6] was founded. But the follow up was unfortunately not very good. The writing of a summary and presentation white paper, Report of First Summit on International Cooperation on Digital Libraries [7] was delayed for many months and any other planned initiatives have still not started yet and that in spite of a thoroughly thought through approach, including efforts to secure funding.
During the conference in Heraklion, the UK eLib Programme invited to a meeting with 25 representatives from 15 countries and several continents to discuss possible cooperation between "Quality controlled subject gateways" (SBIG's) on the Internet. A good overview of the efforts so far and the issues and benefits of a cooperation was accomplished. After the conference, a website for IMESH [8] and a discussion list were established immediately and some follow up discussions started. The UK programme and the US Internet Scout project secured funding for a series of invitational workshops in 1999; the first one taking place in the beginning of June in the UK. But even here, soon the online discussions have been slowing down and no one seems to have the time to establish a more organised discussion and cooperation via mail. In this case there is some hope that eLib can assign this task to a new project officer for international cooperation.
This same meeting also led to ad hoc meetings during the conference between the Internet Scout project and several European groups, among others from the DESIRE project [9], preparing a real technical cooperation around an effort proposed in a DLib-Magazine article last June [10]. Several quality controlled subject gateways, who already offer standard-based descriptive metadata of their content intend to explore protocols for distributed searching (CIP/whois++, LDAP) in an effort to accomplish cross- searching in many cooperating databases of this type and to finally offer a public service supporting precise discovery of quality Internet resources in many subject areas. This effort seems to fit well into already running and funded efforts at most partners (Project Isaac [11]).
At least for our project, the participation in such an interdisciplinary and international conference, still presents both information, contacts and cooperation options, very hard to accomplish via Internet communication alone. Due to the fact, that national and European Union institutions in their efforts still fall behind the truly international cooperation options via the Internet and international conferences (lack of funding options for all partners from non-member areas, lack of dedicated and coordinated support for such projects and their preparation etc.), several of the above mentioned very promising options might turn out to be outside our possibilities or even fail to be effective and succesfull at all. The Digital Library conferences in 1999 will provide good opportunities to discuss and approach the problems concerning the big cooperative efforts and for the start of those small and cheap but rewarding real world actions.
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Traugott Koch
NetLab - Senior Librarian
Electronic InformationServices
Lund University
Library Development Department
Email: traugott.koch@lub.lu.se
URL: http://www.lub.lu.se/person_tk.html
For citation purposes:
Traugott
Koch, "International Cooperation - Real
Opportunities?," Exploit Interactive, issue 1, 10 April 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue1/opportunities/>
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