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In September 1993 the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in association with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced a call for proposals to conduct research on 'digital libraries'. The call document (Appendix A) pointed to the rapid growth in networks and the information sources connected by them. The document continued:
"To explore the full benefits of such digital libraries, the problem for research and development is not merely how to connect everyone and everything together in the network. Rather, it is to achieve an economically feasible capability to digitize massive corpora of extant and new information from heterogeneous and distributed sources; then store, search, process and retrieve information from them in a user friendly way. Among other things, this will require both fundamental research and the development of intelligent software. It is the purpose of this announcement to support such research and development by combining the complementary strengths of the participating agencies in basic research, advanced development and applications, and academic/industry linkage."
Proposals were expected to include either the digitisation of a large and important information collection or the use of an existing collection. These were to serve as an experimental platform to demonstrate scale-up potential and as an experimental testbed for the proposed research.
The research consortia were expected to include, as appropriate to the research focus, the following groups: (1) client groups, (2) commercial enterprises, (3) archival establishments, and (4) relevant computer and other science and engineering research groups. However, the primary proposer was to be an academic institution.
Following the closing date for proposals in February 1994, the Digital Libraries '94 conference was announced as follows:
"An unprecedented opportunity exists for forming a community of scholars to study the theory and practice of digital libraries. The catalyst has been the National Science Foundation's Digital Library Initiative. In preparing responses to the call for proposals, hundreds of researchers have spent uncounted thousands of hours evaluating and re-evaluating the characteristics of the digital library. Innovative, exciting alliances have been formed, bringing together distributed teams drawn from independent research laboratories, client organizations, and industrial entities. In the past few months we have seen what is certainly the greatest collective application of thought to date on issues of the digital library.
Because of their competitive nature, proposals are often developed in private, and the insights that are gained are shared only within the small group of participants. Now that the deadline has passed, we propose that it is time to turn our attention towards dissemination of these insights. By doing so, we can significantly increase the level of sophistication of our collective understanding of the problem area, and begin to take the steps towards building a wide-ranging, open, research community that reflects the diversity of knowledge needed to address the problems of the digital library."
A paper describing some aspects of Project ELVYN was submitted and subsequently accepted for presentation. The full paper is presented as Appendix B.
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