Dan Atkins of the University of Michigan opened the workshop by laying out the "vision space" created by the convergence of technological and social forces. He with Y.T. Chien and John Cherniavsky of NSF depicted a future of converging platforms, converging institutions, and converging media coupled with diverging possibilities and uses for digital libraries. Part of this future could be understood by extrapolation from present practice and technologies, Atkins argued, but much would require more radical insight, innovation, and transformation.
The participants responded to this plea for creative thinking with a variety of pictures of possible futures. The goal of creating large scale, ubiquitously accessible, fully integrated, user-centered digital libraries to support both learning and knowledge work was widely supported. Here, in particular, the value of digital library research for education, research, and commerce was especially clear.
Among the specific challenges researchers set themselves were:
Digital library research, it was argued, should provide users with toolkits to overcome the risk of an information surfeit, allowing people to navigate, to make sense, and to use productively increasingly rich and heterogeneous data sources. Overall, the goal of supporting analysis and discovery in the emerging information space was seen as a crucial promise.
Others pointed to the potential of transnational and multilingual databases to promote intercultural and international harmony. The pursuit of technical, semantic, and linguistic interoperability was presented as viable and particularly important. Several people noted that we should avoid an English language only approach.
In general terms, some of the visionary goals that would be made possible through the "coevolution of high performance computing and communication and digital libraries" might include systems that could support "collocation" and "collaboratories." These should be extensional, compositional, high-capability environments that seamlessly interconnect people and knowledge. Digital libraries should, for example, become part of the infrastructure supporting scientific analysis of collections of data. The ability to analyze terabytes of data will require supercomputer performance and scientific applications in turn will need access to digital libraries as a mechanism for organizing and publishing observations and simulations.
High performance digital libraries might support a "unified field theory" of knowledge representation that could help capture and make usable everyday experience and present, summarize, and visualize data from dynamic sources. And through all this, the necessity for digital library research for facilitating collection, preservation, and long-term access (physical and intellectual access) to digital artifacts was revisited.
The goal is supporting people to find appropriate, timely, trusted information from the exploding number of digital collections offered by individuals and organizations. Furthermore we reminded ourselves often that as information becomes more plentiful, human attention is becoming scarcer. Put more simply, it was suggested that the goal was simply to use computer/communication technology which is fueling information overload to reverse it, and simultaneously, eliminate unintended information depletion. Customizable individual and organizational tools capable of integrating documents, searching archives, and filtering data from repositories anywhere in the world would need to be prepared for desktop use by ordinary users.
In the near term, the digital library initiatives are directed toward scientific research and education. Longer term, the knowledge and technology realized through the initiatives will apply to a very wide array of globallly connected research, learning, and commerce activities. Examples of the promise mentioned at the workshop are:
The purpose of a digital library initiative is to develop understanding and technology to a point where projects such as the above would be feasible.