JCDL

Welcome to JCDL 2005. The ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) is a major international forum that focuses on digital libraries and associated educational, technical and social issues. The theme of JCDL 2005 highlights the powerful role of digital libraries as cyberinfrastructure.

We received over 270 submissions this year (a new record), and the resulting program reflects the high quality of research being conducted on digital libraries in many disciplines. From 105 full papers and 80 short papers, the Program Committee selected 33 long papers and 26 short papers for presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings. To provide a conceptual framework, the presentations and panels comprising the technical program have been organized into three tracks:

Digital Libraries and Cyberinfrastructure Track: These sessions highlight the rich variety of roles that digital libraries continue to play in transforming research and education within the sciences and the humanities. Sessions also focus on issues associated with building digital libraries to transform practice in these areas.

Users and Interaction Track: These sessions focus on understanding user needs, how people work and learn with digital library technologies, and how innovative user interfaces and interaction mechanisms can help people to better use and comprehend digital library resources, collections, and services.

Tools and Techniques Track: These sessions focus on new architectures and frameworks for building digital libraries, as well as discussing emerging algorithms and techniques for improving information retrieval, automatic approaches for resource and collection characterization, and applications of machine learning to a rich variety of digital library problems.

Each day of the conference includes a keynote address that provides context for and furthers the dialog about the role of digital libraries within the evolving framework of a national cyberinfrastructure.JCDL 2005 continues the tradition of supporting digital library developers with eight tutorials that cover a range of important and timely issues including building and evaluating digital libraries and examining how ontologies, interoperability approaches, standards, copyright and preservation are applied in developing and scaling digital libraries. The program also includes five workshops, which provide a venue for a cross-section of disciplines to explore focused, cutting-edge topics such as international scientific data and standards; socio-technical approaches to evaluating digital libraries; providing contexts for learning in educational digital libraries; and preparing library professionals to work in a digital library environment.

JCDL 2005 continues the tradition of supporting digital library developers with eight tutorials that cover a range of important and timely issues including building and evaluating digital libraries and examining how ontologies, interoperability approaches, standards, copyright and preservation are applied in developing and scaling digital libraries. The program also includes five workshops, which provide a venue for a cross-section of disciplines to explore focused, cutting-edge topics such as international scientific data and standards; socio-technical approaches to evaluating digital libraries; providing contexts for learning in educational digital libraries; and preparing library professionals to work in a digital library environment.

The One-Minute Madness session provides a brief overview of 41 posters and 15 demonstrations, which can be viewed during the poster reception and whose abstracts are included here. At the end of the reception, the Best Poster Award, sponsored by the University of Arizona, will be presented.

The following awards will be presented during the Conference Banquet, to be held at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science:<ul><li>Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award (sponsored by ACM)</li><li>Best Student Paper Award (sponsored by IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Digital Libraries)</li><li>Best International Paper Award (sponsored by the University of Arizona).</li></ul>.