Building a digital library research program at Columbia University

This paper provides both an overview of the Digital Library Research Program at Columbia University, along with some detail on three selected projects. First, a review of the interdisciplinary approach to Digital Library Research from the point of view of the Center for Research on Information Access will be presented. Second, technical aspects will be presented on the PERSIVAL medical digital library project, on the Digital Government Research Center, and on the multilingual multidocument summarization project. Finally, a range of projects will be briefly discussed in order to demonstrate the concrete results of taking this interdisciplinary approach.