Digital Libraries Initiative, Phase 2

Summary form only given, as follows. The Digital Libraries Initiative, Phase 2 is a multiagency Federal initiative for conducting research leading to the next generation of digital libraries, advancing the use and usability of globally distributed, networked information resources, and encouraging existing and new communities to focus on innovative application areas. Since digital libraries are meant to provide intellectual access to stores of information, research in this initiative is concerned with developing concepts, technologies and tools to gain use of the fuller knowledge and meaning inherent in digital collections. For example, for users this means intelligent search, retrieval, organization and presentation tools and interfaces; for content and collections providers this means new information types, structures, document encoding and metadata for enhancing context; for system builders this means designing hardware and software systems capable of interpreting and implementing users?? requests by locating, federating and querying collections to provide the user with the structured information sought. Panel speakers will be be drawn from the recent DLI-2 awardees and will represent a broad spectrum of digital library research.