Digital libraries: an international conference plus a very valuable workshop

Cyprus, 23-27 September 2012

The International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries is the successor of the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL). TPDL/ECDL has been the leading European scientific forum on digital libraries for 15 years. The conference continues to bring together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field of digital libraries. TPDL 2012 is organised by the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT) in collaboration with the University of Cyprus and the City University London. It will take place in Paphos, Cyprus on 23-27 September 2012.

Over the last years, Digital Libraries have taken over a central role in our society. As the volume of digital material grows, and its use becomes more ubiquitous, the challenge of combining our digital futures and digital past becomes more important. Innovative methods, collaborative working and new forms of content challenge established digital library methods. Similarly, the need for increasingly sophisticated means for supporting the analysis of digital content by humanists and scientists, practitioners and academics, leads to new difficulties for the infrastructure and interface of information repositories.

General areas of interests include, but are not limited to, the following topics, organized in four areas:

Foundations: Supporting Discovery

Digital libraries: architectures and infrastructures
Representing documents: metadata standards, ontologies and protocols
Interoperability in digital libraries, data and information integration
Systems, algorithms, and models for digital preservation
Information access: retrieval and browsing
Information organisation: automatic and manual
Multimedia information management and retrieval
Multilinguality in digital libraries

Digital Humanities

Digital libraries in cultural heritage
Understanding and supporting the work of digital humanists
Novel research tools and methods in digital humanities
Computational linguistics: text mining and retrieval
Organizational aspects of digital preservation
Information policy and legal aspects (e.g., copyright laws)
Social networks and networked information
Scholarly primitives

Research Data

Architectures for large-scale data management (e.g., Grids, Clouds)
Cyberinfrastructures: architectures, operation and evolution
Distributed and collaborative information environments
Data mining and extraction of structure from networked information
Scientific data curation
Metadata for scientific data, data provenance
Services and workflows for scientific data
Data and knowledge management in virtual organizations
Information visualization

Applications and User Experience

User issues in large information spaces
Exploring Semantic Web and Linked Data
User studies for and evaluation of digital library systems and applications
Personal information management and personal digital libraries
Enterprise-scale knowledge and information management
User behaviour and modelling
User mobility and context awareness in information access
User interfaces for digital libraries
Innovative interfaces and technologies for digital libraries

Keynote speakers at the TPDL conference 2012

Mounia Lalmas (Yahoo! Research, Barcelona)
“User Engagement in the Digital World” - read abstract here
Cathy Marshall (Microsoft Research)
“Whose content is it anyway? Social media, personal data, and the fate of our digital legacy” - read abstract here
Andreas Lanitis (Cyprus University of Technology)
“On the Preservation of Cultural Heritage Through Digitization, Restoration, Reproduction and Usage” - read abstract here

Official TPDL website: http://www.tpdl2012.org/index.php

As a part of the Conference, on the 27th an International Workshop on Supporting Users’ Exploration of Digital Libraries will be held. The aim of the workshop is to stimulate collaboration from experts and stakeholders in Digital Libraries, Cultural Heritage, Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval in order to explore methods and strategies to support exploration of Digital Libraries, beyond the white box paradigm of search and click.

Objectives of the workshop

Large amounts of digital cultural heritage (CH) information have become available recently, partly due to the rise of large-scale aggregators such as Europeana, the European aggregator for museums, archives, libraries, and galleries. These large collections, and similar digital libraries (DL), present an important challenge to new users: discovering what items are present in the collection. In current systems support for item discovery is mainly provided through the standard keyword-based search paradigm, which is well suited for DL professionals who are highly familiar with the collections, subject areas, and have specific search goals. However, for new users who may not have a good understanding of the contents of the collections, be unsure about appropriate keywords, and have vague search goals, this method of access is unsatisfactory.

Alternative item discovery methodologies are required to introduce new users to DL collections, including exploratory search models that enable switching between collection overviews and detailed exploration within the collection.

The aim of the workshop is to stimulate collaboration from experts and stakeholders in Digital Libraries, Cultural Heritage, Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval in order to explore methods and strategies to support exploration of Digital Libraries, beyond the white box paradigm of search and click.

Topics of the workshop

Topics of interest include the following: