The role of AI in digital libraries

The World Wide Web's growing popularity is changing the nature of libraries. Digital libraries offer a huge range of multimedia information-everything from movies, speeches, images, and photos to sounds, text, and beyond. The amount of on-line material is exploding, and the infrastructure for locating and accessing material improves almost daily. With so much and such a wide variety of information available, the problem is changing from simply locating related information to locating the most relevant information efficiently and cost effectively. In building the next generation of digital libraries, artificial intelligence will play several important roles. First, the multimedia nature of digital libraries will require moving beyond simple keyword lookup of information to much more advanced document-processing capabilities in which the system analyzes the content through text analysis, image processing, and speech recognition. Second, the availability of such a huge amount of information will require advances in the infrastructure for organizing and accessing information. A promising approach to this problem is the development of information agents. These agents can provide a variety of services-such as searching, retrieving, filtering, and negotiating-that reduce the burden on the information user or provider. Researchers from several of the major digital library projects present their vision of AI's role in building digital libraries.