Digital Libraries - NSF/ARPA/NASA Research

In 1991 Lesk, Fox and McGill presented the National Science Foundation with a white paper calling for a National Electronic Science Engineering and Technology Library initiative. After lengthy discussions and several workshops (July and December 1992, in Washington and Palo Alto) the National Science Foundation, Advanced Research Projects Administration and National Aeronautics and Space Administration called for proposals for Research on Digital Libraries:

• Capturing, categorizing, organizing information
  • Page, speech, video, graphics understanding
  • Indexing, hypermedia linking, knowledge representation
• Searching, browsing, filtering, summarizing, visualizing
  • theories, models, intelligent processing, learning
  • simulation, navigation, metaphors, optimization
• Networking protocols & standards, using networked information
  • security
  • knowbots
  • compression
  • modeling
  • intellectual property rights (IPR)

Approximately $26M was awarded in October 1994 for 4 years of research led by 6 universities:

• Carnegie-Mellon Univ.
  • Topics: science & math
  • Research: Informedia interactive on-line digital video library
  • Partners: BBC, Bell Atlantic, Microsoft, QED Commun., WQED
• Univ. Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  • Topics: engineering and science literature
  • Research: Mosaic, scalable systems, sociology
  • Partners: Big Ten, BRS, CNRI, IEEE, Physics, U. Arizona, Wiley
• Univ. Michigan
  • Topics: earth and space sciences
  • Research: agents, ontologies, multimedia DL
  • Partners: Apple, Bellcore, Elsevier, Encyl. Britannica, IBM, Kodak, McGraw-Hill, UMI
• Univ. California, Berkeley
  • Topics: environmental information
  • Research: prototype, then State of CA CERES production system;
  • Partners: Cal State Lib., HP, Plumas Corp., Xerox
• Univ. California, Santa Barbara
  • Topics: maps, images, spatial information
  • Research: GIS and library data
  • Partners: Library of Congress, SUNY-Buffalo, USGS
• Stanford Univ.
  • Topics: integrated from personal to library to discipline
  • Research: heterogeneous databases, information bus, clients, sharing
  • Partners: ACM, Bellcore, Dialog, HP, O'Reilly, WAIS Inc., Xerox

See Commmunications of the ACM in April 1995 for a special issue on Digital Libraries that will cover these projects and many other initiatives, such as in Britain, France, and Singapore.