introduction multimedia
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research directions -- digital libraries

 Where media abstractions, as discussed above, aremeant to be technical abstractions needed for uniform access to media items, we need quite a different set of abstraction to cope with one of the major applications of multimedia information storage and retrieval: digital libraries.

According to  [IR], digital libraries will need a long time to evolve, not only because there are many technical hurdles to be overcome, but also because effective digital libraries are dependent on an active community of users:

digital libraries


Digital libraries are constructed -- collected and organized -- by a community of users. Their functional capabilities support the information needs and users of this community. Digital libraries are an extension, enhancement and integration of a variety of information institutions as physicalplaces where resources are selected, collected, organized, preserved and accessed in support of a user community.

The occurrence of digital libraries on the web is partly a response to advances in technology, and partly due to an increased appreciation of the facilities the internet can provide. From a development perspective, digital libraries may be regarded as:

... federated structures that provide humans both intellectual and physical access to the huge and growing worldwide networks of information encoded in multimedia digital formats.

Early research in digital libraries has focussed on the digitization of existing material, for the preservation of our cultural heritage, as well as on architectural issues for the 'electronic preservation', so to speak, of digital libraries themselves, to make them "immune to degradation and technological obsolescence",  [IR].

To bring order in the variety of research issues related to digital libraries,  [IR] introduces a set of abstractions that is know as the 5S model:

digital libraries (5S)


  • streams: (content) -- from text to multimedia content
  • structures: (data) -- from database to hypertext networks
  • spaces: (information) -- from vector space to virtual reality
  • scenarios: (procedures) -- from service to stories
  • societies: (stakeholders) -- from authors to libraries
These abstractions act as "a framework for providing theoretical and practical unification of digital libraries". More concretely, observe that the framework encompasses three technical notions (streams, structures and spaces; which correspond more or less with data, content and information) and two notions related to the social context of digital libraries (scenarios and societies; which range over possible uses and users, respectively).

For further research you may look at the following resources: 


   D-Lib Forum -- http://www.dlib.org
   Informedia -- http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu
The D-Lib Forum site gives access to a variety of resources, including a magazine with background articles as well as a test-suite that may help you in developing digital library technology. The Informedia site provides an example of a digital library project, with research on, among others, video content analysis, summarization and in-context result presentation.
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eliens@cs.vu.nl

draft version 1 (16/5/2003)