Three years after the launch of the Digital Library Initiative (DLI) and as the initial period of funding draws to a close, this workshop was convened to consider the next step in this vein of research. The very broad title of the workshop, "Distributed Knowledge Work Environments," was deliberately chosen to encourage thinking that would transcend current notions of digital libraries. The consensus after the workshop was, however, that the phrase "digital library" did not overly constrain another round of advanced initiatives and that the phrase "distributed knowledge work environments" was unnecessarily broad. It was noted, however, that the concept of a "digital library" is not merely equivalent to a digitized collection with information management tools. It is rather an environment to bring together collections, services, and people in support of the full life cycle of creation, dissemination, use, and preservation of data, information, and knowledge. The challenges and opportunities that motivate an advanced digital library research initiative are associated with this broad view of digital library environment. Additional digital library research will also both exploit and help motivate investments in advanced networking and high-end computation.
The participants included representatives of the initial DLI projects, representatives of the DLI funding agencies (NSF, DARPA, NASA), and representatives of various bodies both public and private involved in similar activities and/or for whom the work in progress offers considerable promise in dealing with the mounting problems of collecting, archiving, processing, and presenting digital data. (For a list of participants, see Appendix A.)
With the spread of the Internet worldwide, and the large-scale adoption of the World Wide Web as an environment for publishing and sharing, our society has stretched its vision of the reality of the anytime, anyplace, any format digital information world. We now more widely realize both the potential and the shortcomings of the Web, and the importance of improving the utility, effectiveness, performance, scalability and sustainability of current and future digital services and collections. Although the Web provides access to millions of sites, it can obscure quality, genre, and source of information.
Previous private and government investments in initiatives on scientific databases, collaboratories, and digital libraries has advanced the state of the art as well as education in these areas. It has helped the United States build upon its earlier lead in electronic publishing and information access technologies, and provided glimpses of how research, learning, government and commercial activities can become more competitive in a world entering the Information Age. Large and important sectors of the United States economy depend upon efficient support of knowledge workers, and large-scale funding of digital library projects in Australia, Japan, Singapore, Korea, United Kingdom, and Europe provide opportunities for joint ventures as well as encouragement for further United States initiatives.
Work on digital libraries aims to help with generating, sharing and using knowledge. It aims to improve practices of communities so they are more effective, efficient, productive and maximize the benefits of collaboration. It seeks to extend the content and utility of digital libraries to aid existing communities and to facilitate the emergence of new communities of discourse, research, and learning. Communities in this case are defined on multiple dimensions: geography, common interests, values, needs, culture, language, goals, etc.
The workshop quickly revealed a strong, widely shared sense of the progress that has been made in understanding the primary digital library issues over the last three years and of the direction that future work might take. This report sets out to map that direction in broad terms, noting first the promise that participants saw in digital library research (section 2). It then goes on to discuss the central issues around which it seemed particularly important to frame future research in order to fulfill this promise (section 3). It presents this framework under the headings "System-Centered Issues," "Collection-Centered Issues," and "User-Centered Issues." (No priority is implied in this order.) It next turns to consider various interested groups with whom it seemed likely that partnerships would prove synergistic (section 4). Some of these are public institutions and some private. The report then reflects the many discussions held about the structure of future research, including questions of size and duration of projects (section 5). Finally, it offers some conclusions drawn at the workshop.
The participants of the workshop represented different interests and came from a range of distinct academic disciplines and sectors of society. At the workshop they divided into four heterogeneous breakout groups that worked together for two days and then reported back in a plenary session. (For the participants in each group, see Appendix B)
Given the diversity of participants, there were, inevitably, diverging views. It would be misleading, then, for this report to suggest that there was simple unanimity. There was not. For example, some favored research in high-end systems with specialized testbeds, others championed a more populace approach; some took a tool-centered view, others were more system- or user-oriented. Few, though, argued that any of these views were mutually exclusive. Indeed, most argued for future initiatives that should embrace them all. The four working groups created basically the same set of research issues and programmatic features but with different emphasis. Thus, at a high level, this report is genuinely a community consensus.
Over all, there was remarkable agreement on both the need for a complementary research program and the general direction it should take. Indeed, when participants in a concluding session were asked what they had heard that had surprised or discomfited them in the reports from groups in which they had not participated, there was little to report.