Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL)

Citation

Afifi, M. (2003), "Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL)", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2003.23920hac.011

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL)

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL)

Marianne Afifi

This was the third annual JCDL, called joint because of the co-sponsorship of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM SIGIR and ACM SIGWEB) and the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries as well as the participation of the information retrieval, information science, and library communities. It took place May 27-31, 2003 at Rice University in Houston, Texas. JCDL tends to also be quite international with participants from various countries despite the fact that European and Asian Digital Library conferences are being held quite regularly. General information about the conference can be found at www.jcdl.org/ This year's conference was hosted by Rice University and chaired by Cathy Marshall (Microsoft) as program chair and Geneva Henry (Rice University) as general chair. The program committee for the conference is quite large, spanning a variety of expertise in academia, government and private industry. The conference is usually held in conjunction with other meetings such as the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) participants or the NSF Digital Library principal investigators. The conference will continue for at least another four years; the next one takes place in Tucson, Arizona, (see www.jcdl2004.org/ for more information).

I have been involved in both the program and conference committees ever since the first such conference. I found it to be a fascinating and rewarding experience, because it makes one aware of the many directions in which digital libraries are going. I have participated in the evaluation of papers as a librarian with a systems background and find that, although there are only a few librarians who practice rather than teach on the committee, our perspective is often quite different, but it definitely counts. However, I think that it will be an effort to continue the influence of librarians in the field on this conference, because there is a tendency to prefer the more research-oriented computer science and information retrieval submissions.

The conference began with a day of tutorials on digital library topics, such as "Building our own library collections" or "Thesauri and ontologies in digital libraries". The tutorials carry an extra charge.

The general format of the conference consists of paper presentations (long and short), panels, posters and demos. The long and short papers tend to be combined in a loose thematic fashion, for example, a session on Multimedia Issues in Digital Libraries or a session on Standards, Mark-up, and Metadata. It is quite customary at this conference to move in and out of concurrent sessions to hear specific papers. That is what I did as well, and therefore I will only describe some individual presentations and only one complete session.

The keynote speaker was James Boyle (www.james-boyle.com/), the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke University and the founder of the Creative Commons. (www.creativecommons.org). His talk entitled "Where do you click to get the book?", addressed the copyright battles of the twenty-first century. Boyle maintains that the current copyright restrictions are locking out twentieth century culture to a majority of us, because most books exhaust their commercial value within the first five years of their publication. His idea is that we have to address this loss of access to materials in different contexts, not only the loss of monetary gains for the copyright holder but also the loss of access to information about which eventually only a few care. The Creative Commons presents solutions where copyright holders can decide to release their copyright to the public domain or grant licenses to their materials to others with some restrictions. Another important point Boyle made is that copyright and metadata have until now been separate, but that embedding copyright information in metadata would increase the usability of the digital objects in a semantic Web kind of way. Boyle's view is that the library communities, learned societies and universities must do all they can to save fair use.

In the panel session on Hybrid Libraries participants from Harvard, Indiana University, and the University of Texas addressed the shift in libraries from largely print-based organizations to "hybrids" of print and digital libraries, focusing on the implications for technical infrastructure and how to achieve seamless access to collections regardless of their format. In addition, the panelists discussed cultural changes that must occur among users and staff for this transition to be successful. While this discussion is not new, it was well summarized and each speaker approached it from a different angle. I would have liked to see more new ideas to solve some of the problems that many libraries and academic research libraries in particular are facing and that were well delineated in the panelists' talks.

This conference had a fair number of sessions on music retrieval and the most interesting of those was a session entitled "An ethnographic study of music information seeking: implications for the design of a music digital library" by Sally Jo Cunningham and Nina Reeves. The authors wanted to examine user behavior when looking for music in the belief that observing that behavior can inform the interface design of music digital libraries. This type of study appears to be fairly new but essential in understanding fundamental behaviors that are currently not taken into consideration in the design of music retrieval systems. The authors observed searching and browsing behavior in CD shops by accompanying people when they shopped and found some interesting behaviors. For example, the subjects in the study often wanted to search music directly by humming and singing, which is currently only possible in a few instances of digital libraries. Other findings included that browsing by genre is important but problematic because of the definition of genre; people were searching and browsing at the same time; they wanted enhanced lyrics searching; there was a lot of interest in recommendations from others; and there was a surprising visual aspect to selecting CDs.

Posters and demos were presented on the second day of the conference during a reception. Posters tend to describe work-in-progress, while demos usually show systems, software or tools, that would otherwise be difficult to present at such a conference. This part of the conference is one of the most interesting, since the work presented is new and often cutting-edge and the conversations with the authors enhance the visual presentations.

The conference ended with the bestowing of the Vannevar Bush award for the best paper, entitled "How fast is too fast? Evaluating fast forward surrogates for digital video" by Barbara M. Wildemuth et al. The paper was presented earlier in the conference by Gary Marchionini and discusses a study undertaken to test how fast video surrogates can be played for users to be able to comprehend various characteristics of videos when browsing. Video surrogates are what could be termed visual abstracts in that videos are played in a compressed version and at high speed. Users can then recognize the subject-matter or other characteristics of the video. The group which is working on this project is also developing a structure for evaluation of users and interfaces that allow video browsing.

Subsequent to the main conference additional tutorials and several workshops were conducted. Workshops are mini-conferences on certain topics, often conducted entirely apart from the conference with invited papers specific to the workshop. For example, one workshop addressed information visualization interfaces, while another brought together researchers with experience in the use of OAI metadata harvesting.

Marianne Afifi(afifi@usc.edu) is Director of Electronic Resources and Special Projects Development Information Services Division, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA.