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Workshop on Multimedia Contents in Digital Libraries Chania, Crete, Greece, June 2 and 3, 2003 Sponsored by DELOS and NSF Distributed Digital Libraries throughout the world are beginning to organize, store, and manage large amounts of human knowledge for universal remote access any where any time. While traditional libraries were normally built to house collections of print-based information resources (such as books and journals), digital libraries can store information resources in many other forms, including images, sound, video, graphics, programs, etc. Thus, with the development of appropriately sophisticated user interfaces and the deployment of advanced technologies and techniques, users of digital libraries can clearly obtain more complete and more comprehensive information than traditional libraries provide. How to acquire, organize, store, manage, and use these multimedia contents effectively and efficiently are central questions for subject specialists, end-users, library and information scientists and computer scientists. For example, how can subject specialists harness IT to help all levels of users gain meaningful access to content in poor physical shape, in surrogate formats, and to enhance their abilities to understand and learn the subjects under study? How can library and information scientists develop effective ways to create metadata, integrate annotations in these contents for indexing to facilitate better access and retrieval, and to promote the easy use of these resources? How can computer scientists help structure these contents into semantic units (objects) which will be indexed and interconnected with other objects in a variety of ways allowing flexible access, browsing, semantic integration, presentation, and personalization according to the application functionality and the user preferences and goals. Application areas of digital libraries with multimedia contents cover all subject fields, ranging from art and culture, archaeology, and history, to sciences, medicine, and engineering. In addition to traditional texts, they come in a great variety of formats. For example, in the cultural and heritage areas, the types of contents consists of art objects, sculptures, paintings, manuscripts, to handmade scripts on vellum, wood, stone, clay, etc. Users of digital libraries include the general public, students of all levels, subject experts, and knowledge managers. The use of these digital libraries may therefore vary from simple curiosity and casual learning to high-level research and development. The ways of interaction may be highly personalized and may depend on the mode and location of access. Users may often access and synthesize multimedia contents from heterogeneous distributed digital libraries. The contents of digital libraries will naturally evolve and new approaches may be able to adapt to other user communities with new preferences and requirements. This Workshop, organized under the joint sponsorship of DELOS and US/NSF, is to bring together researchers, practitioners and subject specialists interested in multimedia contents in digital libraries to share their ideas and concerns, to present and discuss recent research results, and to map future research directions. Research papers up to 5 pages are solicited in all the research issues of multimedia contents in digital libraries including: * advanced user interfaces to contents of digital libraries, * integration of low-level semantic objects (shape, color, texture) with high-level semantic meanings of the contents * content generation, transformation, security and preservation, * content structuring and adaptation for efficient access and browsing, * automatic and manual encoding for enhanced content addressability and browsing, * use and extensions of standards for encoding contents, and domain specific ontologies for indexing, summarizing, and otherwise specifically encoding contents, * intelligent search and retrieval agent, * standard compatibility and mappings for contents, * personalization of querying, reformulation, browsing, and interaction with contents, * collaborative access to contents of digital libraries, * profiles, stereotypes, profile matching, profile adaptation, profile extraction, * information access, dissemination, delivery, interaction using diverse devices * communities of users and digital libraries, and * support for learning the content of digital libraries. Location The Workshop will be held in Chania, Crete, Greece, June 2 and 3, 2003. Workshop Organization The workshop, organized in the context of the EU Excellence Network on Digital Libraries (DELOS), is sponsored by DELOS and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), with local sponsorship of the Technical University of Crete. Workshop General Chair: Prof. Stavros Christodoulakis, Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Greece. Workshop Program Committee Co-chairs: Prof. Ching-chih Chen, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston, MA, USA. Prof Stavros Christodoulakis, Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Crete, Greece Workshop Program Committee: To be announced at a later date. Paper Submission Guidelines Original research papers up to 5 pages long should be submitted by April 15, 2003 in both Microsoft WORD and Acrobat PDF formats via email to either one of the Program Co-Chairs' email addresses: Prof. Ching-chih Chen: [log in to unmask] Prof. Stavros Christodoulakis: [log in to unmask] David Seaman Director, Digital Library Federation 1755 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Suite 500 Washington, DC 20036 tel: 202-939-4750 fax: 202-939-4765 e-mail: [log in to unmask] web: http://www.diglib.org/