A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

The Digital Library Initiative

The Digital Library Initiative began in 1994, when three federal agencies -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) , the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) -- collaboratively awarded six contracts, totaling $24.6 million, to six university-based groups. The contracts have a duration of four years, and each university is required to provide matching support that approximately doubles the total budget of the effort.

According to the NSF webpage, the goal of the Digital Library Initiative is to "advance the means to collect, store, and organize information in digital forms, and make it available for searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks -- all in user-friendly ways." The initiative emphasizes the need for partnerships that include researchers, developers, and users. Many of the six universities that are sites of the Digital Library Initiative have established working relationships with commercial firms such as Xerox and Microsoft, and with large institutions such as the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library.

In 1998 the three federal agencies opened competition for Phase II of the Initiative.

The Digital Library Initiative will doubtless shape the future of information research and access, yet we have excluded it from our analysis for two reasons:

1. The level of funding so far exceeds that for all other library research that it cannot be included in the analysis without distorting the results.

2. Most of the work is being done by researchers in computer science and information science, with comparatively little input from traditional library researchers.

Nevertheless, the following information is provided as a matter of interest. Each site concentrates on a different aspect of the total project.

1. Carnegie-Mellon University. Grant $4.8 million

   Carnegie-Mellon University and WQED/Pittsburgh are creating the Informedia interactive on-line digital video library system, which will enable users to access, explore, and retrieve science and mathematics materials from video archives. The system integrates speech, image, and natural language understanding technologies. Research will also address issues involving human-computer interaction, pricing and charging for digital video use, and privacy and security.

2. Stanford University. Grant $3.6 million

   The Stanford Digital Library project focuses on inter-operability. It is developing the enabling technologies for an integrated virtual library that will provide uniform access to networked information. The project also includes research about how to pay for information and resources over the network, and it is collecting information about legal issues, especially the fair use of intellectual property.

3. University of California at Berkeley. Grant $4 million

   The Berkeley Digital Library focuses on environmental information. The goal is to "develop the technologies for intelligent access to massive, distributed collections of photographs, satellite images, maps, full text documents, and 'multivalent' documents." Personnel include faculty, staff, and students in the Computing Science Division, the School of Information Management & Systems, and the Research Program in Environmental Planning & Geographic Information Systems.

4. University of California at Santa Barbara. Grant $4 million

   Project Alexandria is developing a digital library that will offer access to collections of maps, images, and pictorial materials as well as new electronic library services. The project has begun with collections of digitized maps, images, and airphotos relating to Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles counties, and will grow to include components at other academic sites as well as federal agencies and public institutions including public libraries.

5. University of Illinois. Grant $4 million

   Based at the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, this project focuses on journals and magazines n the engineering science literature. The Graduate School of Library and Information Science is conducting the research, which includes a sociological evaluation of the testbed, "technological development of semantic retrieval," and the design of "scalable information systems (the Interspace)."

6. University of Michigan. Grant $4 million

   The project is developing the testbed of a multimedia digital library focused on earth and space sciences. The prototype system will be tested and evaluated by a wide variety of users, including college and high-school teachers and students and the users of public libraries.

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