Proceedings of the Third European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries

Held in Paris, France, 1999

The Proceedings have been published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1696 Springer 1999, ISBN 3-540-66558-7,
and can be accessed from here.

Preface, by Serge Abiteboul, Program chair

After Pisa in 1997 and Heraklion in 1998, ECDL took place in Paris at the prestigious location of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. It was co-organized by BNF and INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique). It was the third of a series, partially funded by the European Commission's TMR Programme and ERCIM (the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics). Its main objective was to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines to present their work on enabling technologies for digital libraries. The conference also provided an opportunity for scientists to develop a research community in Europe focusing on digital library development.

The program committee, chaired by Serge Abiteboul, selected 26 papers from 124 submissions, in the following topics: image categorization and access, audio and video in digital libraries, information retrieval, user adaptation, knowledge sharing, cross language, case studies, and modeling, accessibility and connectness. Works inspired by the Web were particularly present in this third ECDL. Some selected papers from the conference will be published in a special issue the International Journal on Digital Libraries.

Besides the technical presentations, the conference featured demonstrations, two tutorials, three panels and bird-of-a-feather sessions. Two great invited presentations by Jean-François Abramatic, Chairman of W3C, and Robert Wilensky, Professor at U.C. Berkeley, were particularly inspiring.

The conference attracted 260 participants including researchers and DL librarians. The program committee chose to reduce the number of parallel tracks to at most two. This was achieved by being purposely quite selective. The fact that the attendance was quite high till the last session showed the success of that policy.

Invited presentations

List of accepted papers