Rice to host Digital Library Conference

admin
– March 21, 2002Posted in: Current News

Rice
to host Digital Library Conference
…………………………………………………………………

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News Staff

Rice University
has been selected to host the annual Joint Conference on
Digital Libraries (JCDL) in May 2003.

Sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery and
the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer
Society, JCDL is a major international forum focusing on
digital libraries and associated technical, practical and
social issues.

“This five-day conference is usually attended by 300
to 500 professionals, mostly from academia, and we’re
hoping to find space on campus to accommodate all the sessions,”
said Geneva Henry, executive director of Rice’s Digital
Library Initiative, who wrote the proposal to hold the 2003
event here.

Digital libraries are a new form of information institutions.
They contain information from a wide variety of media, including
text, photo, video, sound and other formats, that has been
digitized into bits of data that can be recombined for easy
manipulation and compressed for storage. Regardless of the
format in which information originally appeared, that information
is readily accessible in a digital library. In addition
to the storage of information, the digital library features
operational systems for selecting, collecting, organizing
and distributing digital content.

The annual conference will consist of tutorial sessions,
paper presentations and a banquet with a keynote speaker.
Paper submissions will be solicited either in late fall
this year or early spring next year, Henry said.

“The awarding of this conference to Rice is a major
achievement,” said Chuck Henry, chief information officer,
“because it enhances the university’s role as
a national leader for digital library initiatives and ideas.”

The purpose of
the Digital Library Initiative at Rice is to heighten awareness
on campus as well as outside the university of various projects
here that relate to digitized information. “Such an
awareness can promote collaboration and also alert someone
about whom they can go to for help when they run into such
problems as data storage or intellectual property rights
and management,” Henry said.

This year’s JCDL will be held in Portland, Ore., in
July. Tentative dates for the conference at Rice are May
27-31, 2003.

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