Starting this month, you will note a change in the home page for D-Lib (http://www.dlib.org). I'd like to give you some background for this change.
The D-Lib Forum was started by CNRI in 1995, sponsored by DARPA on behalf of the interagency digital library activities. The purpose of the D-Lib Forum is to facilitate cooperation amongst the community working to further the field of digital libraries. D-Lib Forum supports and facilitates collaborative activities, information exchange, and communications of this community.
One of the first activities undertaken under the D-Lib Forum was to establish the online magazine, D-Lib Magazine, which has been published continuously since July 1995. I personally have found the articles contributed by you to be most informative and interesting. Our goal is to continue this high level of quality and interest.
Over the past couple of years, several other activities have been initiated as part of D-Lib Forum. For example, a working group on metrics for digital libraries has been established, and is working hard to develop usable and useful metrics for the complex world of distributed heterogeneous digital libraries that would allow us to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of different approaches and component technologies. A complementary effort is establishing a test suite of library collections that can be used for collaborative research and as a set of corpora for evaluation.
We anticipate the formation of additional working groups and other community activities as we move forward towards our vision of a global digital library. D-Lib Forum is intended to help support and facilitate such activities. An Advisory Board has been formed of senior leaders of the community to help assure that D-Lib Forum is effective in serving the needs of the community.
Which brings me back to the change in the home page. We hope that this new home page provides an effective structure to identify the various D-Lib Forum activities.
If you have any comments on D-Lib Forum or the home page, please don't hesitate to contact me directly at [email protected]. In particular, if you would like to see a specific new activity supported by D-Lib Forum, I would be most happy to discuss this with you.
And I look forward to working with you as we move the field forward.
Barry M. Leiner
Executive Director, D-Lib Forum
Copyright (c) 1999 Corporation for National Research Initiatives
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last modified 9/10/99