Future digital libraries: Research and responsibilities

In October 1991 the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored a workshop to examine the role of the Information Retrieval research community in the emerging environment of Internet, high performance text processing capabilities and ever-increasing volumes of digitized documents. Ed Fox, Michael Lesk and Michael McGill drafted a White Paper, calling for a National Electronic Science, Engineering, and Technology Library. The term “Digital Library” was adopted and for follow-up workshops with the goal to identify research directions, leading to National Science Foundation (NSF)/Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)/National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Research in Digital Libraries Initiative announced in late 1993. Now, in 2016, 25 years after the first workshop, 15 years after the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries has been established, and many initiatives and developments around the world, what is the state of Digital Libraries? What items should be in digital libraries, who should their custodians, how can the items be organized to support knowledge discovery, how can the contents be safeguarded and preserved? Ebla, Syria (2500 B.C.–2250 B.C.) constitutes the oldest organized library of tables yet discovered. What will the archeologists discover in year 4400 about the world, politics, economies, technologies, science, climate, species, health, food, culture, art, entertainment and everyday life through the ages? The talk will examine what we can do to support innovative research and design and implementation of lasting, informative Digital Libraries that will promote global goals of knowledge discovery and international understanding and personal needs to organize and selectively share important facts, creations, and memories.