Digital Library Projects

DIGITAL LIBRARY PROJECTS
A Selective List with Links

Alexandria Project		Located at the Davidson Library of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Alexandria is the cooperative effort of researchers and educators from both the public and private sectors to make geographical information available over the Internet. "The centerpiece of the Alexandria Project is the Alexandria Digital Library," an electronic resource providing materials from the Map and Imagery Laboratory in the Davidson Library and other geographic materials. Goals of Alexandria are to research means for distributing multimedia electronically, develop technology to support electronic distribution, and to field test the technology and implement a digital library.

Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities		Princeton and Rutgers Universities established the Center in 1991 to "satisfy the needs of research and teaching in the humanities." Many texts are available online at no charge. Other texts are restricted to certain users or are available through subscription. Projects currently sponsored by the Center include the Humanities and Social Sciences Data Center, the Medieval and Early Modern Data Bank, the Freud Textbase, the SGML Conversion of the Oral History Archives of World War II, HOW(ever), the Griffis Collection, Project Theophrastus, and the Humanist Subscription Database.

Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval		The CIIR partners with both government and industry to develop software that will support information exchange and retrieval and is concerned with all aspects of information retrieval from protocols to user interfaces to multimedia retrieval. The Center's "core" concerns include retrieval techniques, indexing, learning, interfaces, distributed scalable IR, multilingual and cross-linqual IR, information resource integration, categorization, multimedia indexing and retrieval, automated knowledge acquisition, information extraction, sophisticated access, and case-based reasoning. The Center has partnered with such organizations as America Online, Data General Corporation, the Defense Technical Information Center, Digital Equipment Corporation, Lotus Development Corporation, and numerous government departments including the IRS, the Department of Defense, and the Library of Congress.

Center for Research on Information Access		The CRIA has worked toward coordinating digital technology projects at Columbia University since 1995. A joint effort of the University Libraries and the Computer Science Department, the Center's current projects include the Spoken Yiddish Project, several National Science Foundation projects covering rights management, document summaries, automatic topic identification, and computational tractability, and research into OCR for scanned legal documents. The Center's homepage also provides links to several digital library projects underway at Columbia.

Center for the Study of Digital Libraries		The CSDL was established in 1995 to "foster pioneering research on the theory and application of digital libraries and to create flexible and efficient new technologies for their use." The Center focuses on facilitating two broad areas of research: digital library projects and computing infrastructure projects. Notable digital library projects currently being developed include the George Bush Digital Library, the Cervantes Project 2001, and the TAMU Herbaria Project. The Center is also cooperating with the Flora of Texas Consortium, the Texas Engineering Experiment Station, and the US Department of Agriculture in developing digital collections in support of their many projects and has numerous computing infrastructure projects in the works, including Walden's Paths, a K-12 education project intended to help educators organize the Web for their students.

Digital Library Federation		The DLF was founded in 1995 as a cooperative project aimed at exploring the establishment of an "open digital library." A number of major research institutions were instrumental in founding the project, including the Library of Congress, Yale University, Harvard University, Penn State, Princeton, and Columbia University. The Federation's charter outlines its goals.

Informedia		Through funding from the NSF, DARPA, and NASA, Carnegie Mellon University is establishing a multimedia library on the Web that will ultimately contain digital video, audio, images, and text. A major thrust of the project is to automatically index soundtracks and provide access to them through a full-text retrieval system. The text database then provides access to "video paragraphs" within the digitized video collections. Intellectual property laws prevent open access to the collections, but pay-per-view access is planned to offer VHS quality video to K-12 and post-secondary institutions.

NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative Projects		The National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have jointly funded research into digitizing information and making it accessible to users. The Initiative currently funds projects at University of Michigan, University of Illinois, University of California Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and University of California Santa Barbara.

Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance		PRDLA is a consortium of thirteen academic libraries that are working toward building an online resource that will facilitate resource sharing among the constituent libraries. The resulting Pacific Rim Digital Library will feature an "information desk, guides to information resources, exhibits, and digitized books, journals, maps, and manuscripts. The first major project of the PRDLA will be the Pacific Explorations Archive, a digital collection of resources from member libraries that cover the history of the exploration of the Pacific Ocean. The Archive will include maps, drawings, pictures, diaries, and manuscripts and will be available freely over the Internet. Additional projects in the planning include a Multilingual Gateway, a Chines Serials Database, and resources for personnel exchange and document delivery.

Xerox PARC		Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center has been instrumental in developing much of the technology that makes digital libraries possible. Since 1970, researchers at PARC have been developing the "architecture of information," and have invented "personal distributed computing, graphic user interfaces, the first commercial mouse, bit-mapped displays, Ethernet, client/server architecture, object-oriented programming, laser printing, and many of the basic protocols of the Internet." Their projects include work on Digital Libraries and on Human-Computer Interaction.

Additional links to digital library projects are referenced in IFLA's Digital Libraries: Resources and Projects.

Comments & Suggestions
to Jim Alderman.

Updated 8 December 1998.