vldl 2010 - Third Workshop on Very Large Digital Libraries

The implementation of modern Digital Libraries is more demanding than in the past. Information consumers are facing with the need to access ever growing, heterogeneous, possibly federated Information Spaces while information providers are interested in satisfying such needs by sharing rich and organised views over their information deluge. Because of their fundamental role of information production and dissemination vehicle, Digital Libraries are also expected to provide information society with functionalities and services that must be available 24/7 and guarantee the expected quality of service. This scenario leads to the development of Very Large Digital Libraries, which are “very large” in terms of the number of information objects and collections to be made available, users to be served and potentially distributed functionality/content resources needed to construct them. Research on VLDLs opens up novel and actual scenarios, where researchers have to confront with new foundational and system design challenges in a context having scalability, interoperability and sustainability as focal points. Authors and participants of the past editions of Very Large Digital Library Workshop, respectively at ECDL 2008[2] and ECDL 2009[3] , have confirmed the importance of the topic and eagerly started investigating the foundations of this new and “hot” research field (results have been published at SIGMOD Record[4] and D-Lib Magazine[5] ). The goal of the Third Very Large Digital Library workshop is to prosecute such fertile discussions, hence to continue on providing researchers, practitioners and application developers with a forum fostering a constructive exchange among all key actors in the field of Very Large Digital Libraries.

Topics of this workshop are of interest to, but not limited to, the following research avenues.
Foundational topics
Definitional models, for VLDL content, functionality, users, and policies (ref. DELOS reference model):
Architectural models for VLDL systems;
Data models for VLDL content;
Design methodologies for VLDLs.
System topics
Ideas, experiments and practical experiences in VLDLs design and implementation:
Constructing VLDLs as integration and federation of existing DLs;
User management in VLDLs;
Security issues in VLDLs;
Sustainability issues in VLDLs;
Scalability issues in VLDLs;
Distribution issues for VLDLs;
Interoperability issues for VLDLs: content and functionalities;
Managing content in VLDLs: storage, indexing, integration, aggregation, preservation, manipulation, and others.