Larsen Awarded NSF Grant to Conduct Post Digital Library Workshop

PITTSBURGH—The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded an $86,078 grant to Ronald Larsen, dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, and Howard Wactlar, vice provost for research computing in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, to conduct an NSF Post Digital Library Futures workshop June 15 through 17 at the Wequassett Inn in Chatham, Mass.

Following eight years of research in the development of digital libraries technologies, resources, and services, digital libraries have advanced from dream to reality, producing major national projects such as the National Science Digital Library. NSF is taking this opportunity to refine and extend its long-term research agenda to address the evolving challenges and opportunities of advanced network-based information services.

According to Larsen, the workshop is intended to "build more ubiquitous, comprehensive digital environments that become interactive and functionally complete for research communities in terms of people, data, information, tools, and instruments and that operate at unprecedented levels of computational, storage, and data transfer capacity."

More than 40 national and international researchers and scholars are expected to participate in the workshop. The NSF hopes to engage the international community of scholars, practitioners, and users to advise it on future research needs and opportunities. Larsen said he anticipates that the workshop and its proceedings will "spawn a broader discussion throughout the research community that will converge in substantial concurrence around a final set of recommendations to help shape the future of federally-sponsored research in this critical area."

The proceedings will be available on the workshop Web site later this summer. For more information, visit www.sis.pitt.edu/~dlwkshop/.

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