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Report on Digital Libraries '94
The Digital Libraries '94
Conference Digital Libraries '94 was held at Texas A & M University,
College Station, Texas from 19 to 21 June 1994. Maps showing the location of
College Station and the campus layout are presented as Appendix C. N.B. Not
available in electronic form.
Prior to the registration event, the Hypermedia Research Laboratory held an
'Open House' and demonstrated various projects including a collaborative editing
tool, a data-glove and the Trellis system. A list of the Laboratory's available
reports is presented as Appendix D. N.B. Not available in electronic form.
Following registration and dinner, the conference began with a Keynote
address by Paul Evan Peters, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked
Information. His speaker's notes were on an Apple PowerBook laptop computer and
the first section of his talk was poorly delivered as he read from the screen
with frequent mis-readings. However, the PowerBook battery ran out and nobody in
the room had a mains adapter so he was forced to speak from memory. While this
may have led to a loss in structural coherence, the move to a natural spoken
delivery form was very welcome.
Paul Evan Peters made four basic points as follows:
"It's a
network, stupid." This point was intended to encourage network thinking
from the outset rather than, say, developing an application on a stand-alone
workstation and then thinking about how it would transfer to a network
environment.
"Assume
bandwidth costs nothing." This was an interesting point at a time when both
the US and the UK are spending large amounts of money in order to increase
bandwidth. However, the point was made by analogy with aspirin — the
distribution cost of getting aspirin to the shop is a relatively small
proportion of the total cost of research, development and manufacture.
"Be
prepared for relationship reversals." Specifically, the relationship
between predator and prey was highlighted. At present, people are the predators,
hunting for information. However, the speaker foresaw a time when information
would be 'hunting' for people.
"Disintermediation
is a research issue." If I understood it correctly, this point refers to
the intermediaries between author and reader in the publishing chain and avers
that the network does not automatically alter existing relationships. In fact
this is the premise on which Project ELVYN is based, although we have never
thought to use the term 'disintermediation'.
The PowerBook failure was repeated on the second day of the conference when
Ed Fox attempted to report on the digital libraries workshop held in March 1994
at Rutgers University. His machine kept re-booting, despite the fact that 'it
worked half an hour ago'.
The conference Programme is presented as Appendix E (not in electronic form)
and the abstracts of papers are presented as Appendix F
.
Because the conference arose out of the NSF initiative, many of the papers
basically describe a research agenda — what the authors will do if their
application is successful. In this respect the conference was somewhat unusual
in that most speakers were not describing results or even work-in-progress.
Presumably future conferences will reverse this imbalance. However, it was
important to display a British presence in the field — the paper on ELVYN
was the only British paper presented, although Southampton University
was represented by Hugh Davis from the Image and Multimedia Research Laboratory
and the printed Proceedings contain Hugh's position statement.
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