Welcome by the Program Chairs

Welcome to JCDL 2008! Authors from 27 countries submitted technical papers to the conference this year. A large number of reviewing and organizing volunteers then worked hard to bring this meeting together. Thanks to their efforts we have assembled a program that should keep you busy at the conference. For the first time we also decided to expose ourselves to the realities of digital information by distributing the proceedings as USB memory sticks. The materials you find on your stick will also be available on the ACM Digital Library.

Over the past decades, joint efforts of computing and library communities worldwide have resulted in information technologies way beyond online catalogs and scanned materials. The result has been a raised level of attention to the incorporation of digital video, geographically anchored information, economic models of digital publishing, novel user interfaces to online resources, and a number of further aspects that broadened the notion of librarianship.

The World-Wide Web added additional dimensions. Large interlinked document networks, citizen authorship, extreme rates of content production, and the internationalization of the Web ‘collection’ are some of the additional challenges the Web contributed to our field.

The 117 full papers and 61 short papers we received this year covered all of these aspects. The submissions demonstrated that the interdisciplinary spirit of Digital Libraries as an academic and industry discipline is vibrantly alive.

We could, of course, accept but a small fraction of the submissions. The program committee selected 33 of the full papers and 21 of the shorts. The acceptance rate was thus 28% for full papers, and 34% for short format submissions.

Our program this year also includes a room full of posters and demonstrations, as well as panels and three invited keynote speakers. Tutorials, workshops, and the Doctoral Consortium frame the core program, making for a very full experience all around.

Special thanks go to the chairs of all these program sections: Gene Golovchinsky (Workshops), Carl Lagoze, Sandy Payette (Tutorials), Lillian Cassel (Posters/Demos), Geneva Henry, Michael Nelson (Doctoral Consortium), and Paul Conway (Panels). We owe a big thank-you also to the international program committee and local organizers.
We hope you enjoy your week at the conference and will consider submitting your work to JCDL 2009.