This award supports travel stipends for students to participate in Doctoral Consortium (July 22, 2013) and in the 2013 ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2013), to be held in Indianapolis, Indiana, June 23-25, 2013 (www.jcdl2013.org). The selected PhD students are in the early stages of their dissertation work and several international students are included in order to provide breadth in exchanging ideas. The goal of the consortium is to help students develop their dissertation proposals and research plans through feedback and guidance from prominent researchers and experienced practitioners from the field of digital library research and development. The JCDL Doctoral Consortium provides a forum for Ph.D. students to interact with major leaders in the digital library community. These international leaders exemplify a broad set of expertise, diversity of perspectives, and wealth of knowledge. The consortium provides students with an opportunity to have broad audience and interact intellectually with professionals who would otherwise be difficult to meet with. Participating students will be selected on the basis of a paper describing their research. At the consortium, participants will have approximately 40 minutes to present their research plans and receive feedback from the panel. After the consortium the students will revise their papers based on the consortium's feedback and then they will be published in the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries publication "TCDL Bulletin" (www.ieee-tcdl.org/mediawiki/TCDL/index.php/IEEE-TCDL).
Participation in JCDL 2013 Doctoral Consortium and conference will expose the selected students as well as other attending students to a larger community, extend their opportunities for intellectual engagement, and encourage scholarly discourse and networking among new entrants into the field. The goal is to help shape ongoing and future teaching, research, and development projects in the field of digital libraries by providing wider exposure for the students to innovative ideas which may generate new research questions in the future, and to foster a sense of community among these young researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. The organizers will also take special steps to solicit participation from institutions with underrepresented groups to extend the potential benefits and broaden the horizon of expertise in the field.
, held in Indianapolis, IL on July 22, 2103. The project was extended to also support the Doctoral Consortium of the Digital Libraries 2014 conference, held in London, UK on September 8, 2014. The Doctoral Consortium is a workshop for Ph.D. students from all over the world who are in the early phases of their dissertation work. The goal of the Doctoral Consortium is to help students with their thesis and research plans by providing feedback and general advice in a constructive and international atmosphere. A panel of prominent professors and experienced practitioners in the field of digital library research in organizations from different countries and continents conducted the workshops. They reviewed all the submissions and commented on the content of the thesis as well as on the presentation. Eleven doctoral students from diverse institutions participated in the 2013 DC: eight from US universities and three international PhD candidates (Spain, China); Eight doctoral students from universities in France, Portugal, Norway, Singapore, Australia, Netherlands, Botswana, and Germany participated in the 2014 DC. After the conclusion of the Doctoral Consortium, papers based on their presentations were published in the December 2013 (volume 9, issue 2) and February 2015 (volume 11, issue 1) issues of the Bulletin of IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries (TCDL). Additionally, four US-based doctoral students were supported as observers to the 2014 DC. These observers were selected from the pool of US-based student authors of DL 2014 papers nominated for the Best Student Paper Award. These observers were able to benefit from the presentations by the senior researcher mentors and doctoral student attendees to the DC, and from participation in the lively discussions at the event. Further, a US-based doctoral student was supported to provide technical assistance in running the DC. The science proposed in the student presentations was greatly refined and improved by the input of all the participants. This project provided an invaluable training opportunity for the next generation of researchers in the field of digital libraries and related disciplines. In addition to the review of the research in the Doctoral Consortium itself, it allowed the students to attend the conference, meet active researchers, and established connections with other students that will pay off in the future. The wide variety of sub-disciplines and institutions involved enriched the experiences of the students. All told, the experiences made possible by the DC will enhance the ability of the participants to more fully engage in research and service that benefits both the scientific and broader civil communities.
