The First National Conference on

DIGITAL LIBRARIES:
ADVANCED METHODS AND TECHNOLOGIES, DIGITAL COLLECTIONS

The Conference is dedicated
to the 275th Anniversary of the Russian Academy of Science
and
to the 275th Anniversary of St-Petersburg State University

Digital Libraries as the area of research and technological development aims at elaboration of theory and practice of acquisition, modeling, management and dissemination of digital information via networking media. The explosion of the World Wide Web and of the multimedia technology provide initial techniques for organization of digital information collections and indicate a technical framework for the libraries of the future. At the same time, Digital Libraries - complex and advanced forms of information systems - are considered as distributed repositories of knowledge.

The Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) in frame of its 'Digital Libraries' Program had organized in December 1998 in Moscow the Workshop "Digital Libraries: advanced methods and technologies, digital collections". The Workshop has been primarily intended for developers of the projects recently accepted by RFBR for its Digital Library program.

RFBR, based on the recommendation of the Workshop discussion and taking into account wide interest in Russia to research and development in the digital library area going far beyond current RFBR Digital Library Program, decided to transform this Digital Library Workshop into the Annual National Digital Library Conference with possible International participation.

The main objective of the Conference is to organize a forum bringing together researchers from multiple disciplines to present their work on enabling methods and technologies for digital libraries. The conference also provides an opportunity for scientists to consolidate a research community in Russia focusing on digital library development.

Research quality presentations are expected demonstrating the planned approaches and their contribution comparing to the methods and technologies known. Specific attention is planned also for testbeds and digital collections that should be formed in frame of the various projects. Original contributions are specifically solicited. The presentations are expected but are not limited to the following list of topics:

• methods and tools leading to wide-spectrum information discovery, search, retrieval, manipulation
• information querying, presentation and visualization
• theories and models for semantic search and retrieval
• multilingual information access and cross-lingual data services
• intelligent analysis, search and classification of text/image/video types by content and structure
• natural language analysis for data extraction, structure and topical segmentation, linguistic support, ontologies, thesauri, indexing
• advanced multimedia information capture, representation and digitization
• intelligent user interfaces, agents to support human needs
• heterogeneous digital collection (content) interoperability
• metadata objectives, types, standards; metadata and information content
• social science research and humanities research applied to distributed digital information environments
• legal and security issues associated with the creation and use of digital collections
• open, networked architectures for digital information environments, relevant standards development
• testbeds and digital collections (new (original) types of digital collections for science, education and culture, new means for establishing relationships among knowledge sources, metadata, interoperation interfaces).

The Conference Proceedings will be published.

DATES AND VENUE

Paper submission due: June 1, 1999. (The submission rules see below.).

Papers from the Western researchers will be attracted on the invitation basis.

Notification of acceptance: July 1, 1999.

Camera-ready copies: August 20, 1999.
The rules for the camera-ready copy preparations will be provided in further announcements.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Co-Chairs:

• L.A.Kalinichenko (IPI RAS)
• V.A.Kapustin (SPbSU)
• O.V.Siountiourenko (RFBR)

Members:

• E.M.Beniaminov (Moscow)
• Y.A.Bukhshtab (Moscow)
• V.N.Zakharov (Moscow)
• E.N.Kazakov (Moscow)
• M.R.Kogalovsky (Moscow)
• E.G.Kolesnichenko (Moscow)
• N.A.Kolchanov (Novosibirsk)
• N.V.Maximov (Moscow)
• A.G.Marchuk (Novosibirsk)
• B.A.Novikov (St.-Petersburg)
• V.A.Tuzov (St.-Petersburg)
• V.R.Khisamutdinov (Moscow)
• T.N.Yudina (Moscow)

EUROPEAN ADVISOR:

• Constantino Thanos (IEI-CNR, Italy)

ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITTEE

Chair:

• N.V.Borisov (ICAPE SPbSU)

Deputy Chairs:

• L.A.Kalinichenko (IPI RAS)
• O.V.Siountiourenko (RFBR)

Members:

• A.V.Bogdanov (St.-Petersburg)
• T.V.Ershova (Moscow)
• V.A.Kapustin (St.-Petersburg)
• B.A.Novikov (St.-Petersburg)
• A.I.Plemnik (St.-Petersburg)
• V.A.Tuzov (St.-Petersburg)
• V.G.Veselago (Moscow)

PAPER SUBMISSION

The size of the extended abstracts should be from 2 up to 5 pages (approx. from 3500 to 10000 characters, HTML tags not counted).