Keynote Addresses

The research and development community has been actively creating and deploying digital libraries for more than two decades and many digital libraries have become indispensable tools in the daily life of people around the world. Today's digital libraries include interactive multimedia and powerful tools for searching and sharing content and experience. As such, digital libraries are moving beyond personal intellectual prostheses to become much more participative and reflective of social history. Digital libraries not only acquire, preserve, and make available informational objects, but also invite annotation, interaction, and leverage usage patterns to better serve patron needs. These various kinds of usage patterns serve two purposes: first, they serve as context for finding and understanding content, and second, they themselves become content that digital libraries must manage and preserve. Thus, digital library research has expanded beyond technical and informational challenges to consider new opportunities for recommendations, support of affinity groups, social awareness, and cross-cultural understanding, as well as new challenges related to personal and group identity, privacy and trust, and curating and preserving ephemeral interactions. This trend makes digital libraries cultural institutions that reveal and hopefully preserve the phenotypes of societies as they evolve.  This talk will illustrate this theoretical perspective with examples from our experience with the Open Video Digital Library over the past decade and with recent extensions (VidArch Project) that harvest YouTube video as a strategy for preserving cultural context for digital collections.

Most of our research and scholarship now relies on curated databases - traditional databases or ontologies that are created and updated with a great deal of human effort. Most reference works that one traditionally found on the reference shelves of libraries such as (dictionaries, encyclopedias, gazetteers, etc.) are now curated databases; and because it is now so easy to publish databases on the web, there has been an explosion in the number of new curated databases used in scientific research. The catalogue or metadata for a digital library is very likely to be a curated database. The value of curated databases lies in the organisation and the quality of the data they contain. Like the paper reference works they have replaced, they usually represent the efforts of a dedicated group of people to produce a definitive description of some subject area.

Given their importance to our work it is surprising that so little attention has been given to the general problems of curated databases. How do we archive them? How do we cite them? And because much of the data in one curated database is often extracted from other databases, how do we understand the provenance of the data we find in the database? Curated databases raise challenging problems not only in computer science but also in intellectual property and the economics of publishing. I shall attempt to describe these.