The Future of Digital Libraries

Dr. Michael Lesk

Director of Division of Information and Intelligent Systems
National Science Foundation
Computer Science Graduate Seminar

CS 5944 Index 9743
Tuesday, Dec. 1, 1998, 3:30 - 4:45 pm
Donaldson Brown Auditorium

Sponsored by:
Department of Computer Science
Information Systems
University Libraries
Digital Library Research Laboratory
Internet Technology Innovation Center

Abstract:

What should the digital library field be trying to achieve? Should digital libraries target education, business, or recreational use, and what kinds of accomplishments do we need and expect? The new DLI-2 competition has 220 proposals, and we have announced a program for international collaboration in digital libraries.

Some perspective on digital libraries is gained by looking at the amount of information in the world, in three ways: how much digital information, how much traditional information, and how much human memory is there? It looks like all of these are measured in thousands of petabytes, and that in a few years there will be so much digital information that it will dominate everything else.

Thus the scarce resource will be attention, not information, as Esther Dyson has written. Filtering, summarizing, and evaluating will be more important than acquiring or searching information.

In centuries past people reacted to information overload by inventing indexes and catalogs. How should we react now?

Biographical Sketch:

Michael Lesk is author of the seminal 1997 Morgan Kaufmann book: Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes & Bucks that has been used as a text in 2 courses at Virginia Tech. At NSF he is Division Director, Information and Intelligent Systems which is the home for NSF digital library efforts. Before coming to NSF he ran computer science activities at Bellcore. Before that he was at Bell Labs, where he was responsible for key parts of UNIX (e.g., lex, yacc) and launched the UUCP networking environment. See his home page http://www.lesk.com/mlesk/

A chemist by training, Dr. Lesk implemented the first version of the SMART information retrieval while at Harvard in the early 1960's. The technology demonstrated in SMART at that time has only recently been made widely available in the new generation of WWW search engines.

Dr. Lesk is Visiting Professor in computer science at University College London; on the Visiting Committee for the Harvard University Library; and worked with the Commission on Preservation and Access addressing digital preservation issues. He received the ``Flame'' award for lifetime achievement from Usenix in 1994, and is a Fellow of the ACM.