Objective

Digital Libraries (DL) is a field of research and development aiming to promote the theory and practice of processing, dissemination, storage, search and analysis of various digital data. Digital Libraries acting as knowledge depositories can be considered as complex information systems, development and use of which require solution of numerous scientific, technological, methodological, economic, legal and other issues. Digital Libraries technologies are rapidly developing. Challenges in semantics, integration of information, perception and presentation of various kinds of data call for significant innovations. Development of Digital Libraries technologies is becoming more and more essential for raising of the standards of health care, education, science and economy, as well as the quality of life on the whole. Projects devoted to generation of the digital form of the information concerning the Earth, Universe, Literature, Art, Environment and Humans, accumulated by the humanity, are examples of the intensive development of global information repositories.

The 2001 All-Russian Conference is the third conference on this subject (1999- St. Petersburg, 2000 - Protvino). The principal objective of the series of conference is to promote the constituting of a community of Russian experts involved in researches related to Digital Libraries. The Conference offers such a community an opportunity to discuss ideas and outcomes and to make contacts for closer cooperation. The Conference also promotes the study of international experience, development of the international cooperation on Digital Libraries. In view of this, papers describing the advanced directions of research and development are welcome. Much attention will be paid to pilot applications and digital collections developed within the RFBR projects on Digital Libraries and other programmes.

The Conference topics include but are not limited to:

• Models and standards for information and metainformation representation (including thesauri and ontologies) in DL
• Methods and tools for data search, discovery, retrieval and analysis in DL
• Access to distributed and heterogeneous digital collections: interoperability, scalability, relevant information discovery, metainformation integration
• Open architectures for digital information environments
• Methods and tools for DL use. Intelligent user interfaces, agent technologies, cooperative work on the data, data visualization (rendering)and analysis
• Analysis and processing of the natural languages, images, video-,audio- and other data
• Multilingual data access and multilingual data service
• DL, DL prototype and digital collections for science, education, culture, health care and management
• Digital collections in traditional libraries, museums, archives, information centers
• Advanced technologies of digital collection generation, storage and system maintenance
• Digital collection cataloging, indexing, referencing, maintenance of integrity and consistency
• DL security and information protection

The Conference Proceedings containing full texts of accepted papers will be published.

Dates and venue

The Conference will be held on September 11-13, 2001 in Petrozavodsk at theInstitute of Applied Mathematical Research (IAMR), Karelian Research Centre (KRC), Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).

Petrozavodsk is the capital of the Republic of Karelia. The city is located on the Onego Lake shore. A trip by railway from St. Petersburg takes app. 8 hours, from Moscow - about 14 hours. It takes 1 h. 20 min. to get from Helsinki (Finland) to Petrozavodsk by air.

More detailed information about Karelia can be found at http://www.karelia.ru.

Participants will be accommodated in the "Belye klyuchi" hotel and resort centre (http://aurinko.karelia.ru/u/kluchi ). Onega lake tour with the Kizhi open-air museum visit is planned.

Paper submission

The Conference languages are Russian and English. Extended abstracts and papers can be in any of the languages. Simultaneous translation of the presentations from Russian into English will be offered for foreign participants.

Original, not published before submissions are solicited. Extended abstracts either in Russian or in English should be e-mailed to the program committee at rcdl2001@krc.karelia.ru in the format HTML 3.2 (frames, style sheets, ActiveX, JavaScript, Java-applet and dynamic HTML elements are not allowed);images in the formats GIF and JPEG can be used. When e-mailing extended abstracts, the text and each image should be sent as attached files. Abstracts in Russian are accepted in the ISO-8859-5, Windows-1251 or KOI8-R character set.

The size of extended abstracts is from 2 to 5 pages (app. 3500 to 10000 characters, HTML tags excluded). Abstracts should provide quite a complete idea of the paper content, include the references to the publications and/or the Internet resources.

Important deadlines

1. Submission of extended abstracts: March 31, 2001
2. Notification of acceptance: May 31, 2001
3. Camera-ready full papers due: June 30, 2001.

Organizing committee

Members:

Program Committee