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hello all - as we start to coast through january into february, DLF Central is beginning to glance with increasing focus on the upcoming Spring Forum. Spr 08 will be held in Minneapolis, MN, from Monday Apr 28 through Wed Apr 30, at the Hyatt Regency. in the coming weeks, we'll provide a formal call for papers. however, it's *not* too early to begin thinking of topics and things that you would like to see appear, whether progress reports or information on new initiatives. the forum will remain an open submission. however, we will will be attempting to create specific groups of papers in the following areas: 1. user experience. this should be construed more broadly than UI issues, including also user navigation, interaction, and site or app functionality for user manipulation. non web apps (e.g., flash, air, silverlight) would be eagerly considered. innovative user navigation tools across large data compilations, e.g., seadragon, are of particular interest. (n.b.: faceted browsing, unless combined with newer functionality, is of less interest, as are other now routine efforts in search result navigation). experiments with new online social information systems such as Twitter would also fall into this category. 2. data management. this would include cyberinfrastructure or e-science applications which involve assistive data management or computation; real time data curation or metadata generation from sensed inputs (e.g. astronomical, ecological, biological, etc); and data modeling. experiments or speculations on the utility of semantic based applications, such as the SIMILE family at MIT, or use of commercial applications such as Freebase or Twine, are of very high interest. 3. large scale architectures. this includes topics relating to the development of massive data and compute stores, particularly those involving "cloud computing" and external, virtualized services such as S3, sun grid services, microsoft virtual servers, and so forth. implementations of mapreduce clones, hadoop, and similar tools are of interest. experimentation with online network based and distributed applications (ie software-as-a- service models) would be well received. topic also includes preservation architectures, particularly those engineered to support near-unbounded scaling. 4. GIS. broadly defined. interest in mapping based overlays of historical tabulated or non-textual data; integration of textual and non-textual resources with geographic or mapping infrastructures; utilization of GIS for computationally based research; generation of virtual earth based user or avatar navigation against rich or deep resource collections (might also be included in user experience category); and so forth. 5. user generated metadata. very interested in applications exploring the mining and re-use of user generated content, particularly metadata (broadly defined), such as that invited by the Library of Congress in their Flickr Commons experiment; UGC supporting LibraryThing, OpenLibrary, and other wide-scale bibliographic systems; re-use (not just collection of) user-based citation application data; applications that take advantage of generated user data, such as usage data, "social graphs", collaborative filtering, etc., for recommending or other enhancement of information discovery and management. and as I said earlier, DLF anticipates that there may be many unexpected or new systems or reports that our community will have interest in hearing about. get them presentation thinking engines warmed up! take care - -- __________________________________________________ peter brantley - executive director digital library federation | http://www.diglib.org __________________________________________________ cell: +1-510-599-5159 | office: +1-510-643-8665