Int J Digit Libr (2000) 3: 1–2 2000 Springer-Verlag

Editorial

In the tradition ofAlexandrian ScholarsSpecial Issue of the International Journal onDigital Libraries

C. Nikolaou and C. Stephanidis

The Alexandrian “daughter library” was establishedabout 235 B.C., by Ptolemy III in the Temple of Sarapis,with the ideal of an international library, incorporatingnot only all Greek literature but also translations intoGreek from the other languages of the Mediterranean, theMiddle East, and India. The scholars of Alexandria hadimmediate access to an enormous collection of works bythe standards of their time. In theory, all these works wereavailable to the scholars even without the library, butthey were not easily accessible. In other words, differentpieces of work were scattered throughout the world, butobtaining a copy was something practically impossiblemost of the time.

In a similar way, an abundance of information ob-jects live, evolve, grow and die in the ocean of the WorldWide Web. In theory, humans can seek information ob-jects through the Internet’s search engines, and if they arelucky enough to find them, they can interact with thoseobjects. However, in reality, this has become increasinglydifficult as the number of objects and the size of the Inter-net grows geometrically with time. As in the case of theAlexandrian “daughter library”, in the information age itis digital libraries that seek to improve upon their physi-cal counterparts, by augmenting human problem solvingcapabilities and enabling a wider audience to reap the re-sulting benefits.

This special issue, entitled “In the Tradition of Alexan-drian Scholars”, is the result of a restricted call for pa-pers for the International Journal on Digital Libraries(IJODL) dedicated to the results of the Second EuropeanConference on Digital Libraries (2ECDL), which was heldin Heraklion, Crete, Greece, 21–23 September 1998. Theconference was partially funded by the TMR Programmeof the European Commission and was actively supportedand promoted by the European Research Consortiumon Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM). 2ECDL wasorganised by the Institute of Computer Science of the

Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas, in con-junction with the Department of Computer Science ofthe University of Crete. The conference was a truly in-ternational event with a distinctively interdisciplinarynature, reflecting the growing interest that the field ofdigital libraries has attracted over recent years in Eu-rope and throughout the world. Conference presentationscovered a wide range of important topics having a sig-nificant impact in the fast-developing field of digital li-braries.

The special issue, which is being published in the threesuccessive journal issues (1, 2, 3) of Volume 4 (2000) ofIJODL, contains extended and enhanced versions of 14papers selected from the 35 full papers presented at theconference. The intention of the special issue is to offer tothe international digital libraries community a collectionof the best results of the conference, as well as an inter-disciplinary account of the most recent advances in thefield. The special issue is organised around six thematicclusters.

Articles in the first section Architectures for digi-tal libraries present architectural frameworks for digitallibraries. Building HyperView wrappers for publisher websites, by L.C. Faulstich and M. Spiliopoulou, describesa framework for dealing with heterogeneity problems ofautomatic metadata acquisition in digital libraries forelectronic journals. The proposed approach is based ona generic methodology for the integration of web sites.A framework for performance monitoring, load balanc-ing, adaptive timeouts and quality of service in digitallibraries, by S. Kapidakis, S. Terzis and J. Sairamesh,investigates issues of performance management in largescale, autonomous and federated digital library systems,performing the tasks of indexing, searching and retrievalof information objects. The article defines a managementarchitecture and a performance framework for measuringand monitoring the behaviour of digital libraries.

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The section Electronic commerce contains two art-icles discussing aspects of electronic commerce applica-tions.An open electronic marketplace through agent-basedworkflows: MOPPET , by S. Arpinar, A. Dogac and N.Tatbul, proposes an electronic marketplace architecturein which commerce processes are modelled as adaptableagent-based workflows. Soft navigation in product cat-alogs, by M. Stolze, discusses soft vs. hard navigationin electronic product catalogues, and presents a productscoring catalogue that supports soft navigation and al-lows users to express and rate their preferences.

The section Case studies presents two concrete ex-amples of digital libraries in the publishing field. Nature– a prototype digital archive, by R. MacIntyre and S.Tanner, reports on a pilot project to discover the tech-nical, financial and content reproduction issues involvedin making the science journal Nature digitally available.The article describes the processes undertaken, the re-sults ascertained from these pilot processes and the tech-niques used. Automatic page analysis for the creation ofa digital library from newspaper archives, by B. Gatos,S.L. Mantzaris, S.J. Perantonis and A. Tsigris, addressesissues pertaining to the retro-conversion of newspapers,i.e., the conversion of newspaper pages into digital re-sources. An integrated approach is presented that pro-vides solutions to problems related to newspaper pageimage enhancement, segmentation of pages into variousitems (titles, text, images, etc.), article identification andreconstruction, and recognition of the textual compo-nents.

The section Advanced techniques for digital li-braries contains two articles illustrating the applicationof advanced techniques to digital libraries. SPIRE, a dig-ital library for scientific information, by L.D. Bergman,V. Castelli, C.S. Li and J.R. Smith, describes the applica-tion of image processing methodologies and techniques ina digital library framework for scientific data, with a focuson support for content-based search. Parallel text align-ment , by C.B. Owen, J. Ford, F. Makedon, T. Steinbergand C. Metaxaki-Kossionides, discusses the applicationof parallel text alignment to multilingual digital libraries.The main result is improved multimedia data access indigital library applications, ranging from facilitating theanalysis of multiple translations of classical texts, to en-abling on-demand and random comparison of multipletranscriptions derived from different sources.

The sectionNatural language processing for dig-ital libraries reports on the application of natural lan-guage processing methodologies and techniques to facili-tate access to digital libraries’ textual content.Automaticrecognition of multi-word terms: the C-value/NC-valuemethod , by K. Frantzi, S. Ananiadou and H. Mimazy,presents a domain-independent method for the automaticextraction of multi-word terms from machine-readablespecial language corpora. The method combines linguis-tic and statistical information. A probabilistic justifica-

tion for using tf/idf term weighting in information re-trieval, by D. Hiemstra, following recent advances in thefield of statistical natural language processing, presents anew probabilistic model of information retrieval, based onthe assumption that documents and queries are definedby an ordered sequence of single terms. Finally,Reductionof expanded search terms for fuzzy English-text retrieval ,by M. Ohta, A. Takasu and J. Adachi, proposes a fuzzyretrieval method to obviate the problems introduced byoptical character reader (OCR) misrecognition in digitallibraries. The proposed methods generate multiple searchterms for each input query term by referring to confusionmatrices, which store all characters likely to be misrecog-nised and the respective probability of each misrecogni-tion.

The final section, Human-computer interactionfor digital libraries, includes three articles that viewdigital libraries from the perspective of the user inter-face. A transaction log analysis of a digital library, by S.Jones, S.J. Cunningham, R. Mcnab and S. Boddie, in-vestigates the interaction of users with digital librariesin practice, through the analysis of transaction logs. Theresults of a case study are reported, focussing on the in-sights gained and identifying resulting search interfacedesign issues. Strategy-based interactive cluster visualiza-tion for information retrieval , by A. Leuski and J. Allan,investigates a general-purpose interactive information or-ganisation system. The system organises and visualisesdocuments by placing them into 1-, 2-, or 3-dimensionalspace based on their similarity and a spring-embeddingalgorithm. A method is described for estimating the qual-ity of the organisation when it is applied to a set of docu-ments returned in response to a query. Relevant docu-ments are shown to tend to clump together in space.Finally, User interaction in digital libraries: coping withdiversity through adaptation, by C. Stephanidis, D. Ak-oumianakis, A. Paramythis and C. Nikolaou, discusseshow user interface adaptations can be used to addressseveral user interaction challenges in the development ofdigital library systems. The article examines some of theintrinsic characteristics of digital library systems, iden-tifies some of the key human-computer interaction chal-lenges in relation to design and architectural abstractionfor user interfaces to digital library systems, and devel-ops an argumentation for unified user interface design indigital library systems.

As guest editors of this special issue, we would like tothank the authors of the articles, the reviewers and thepublisher of IJODL for all their efforts.

November 1999

Christos Nikolaou

Constantine Stephanidis