This two-year award for cooperation on digital libraries involves Daniel E. Atkins and William Birmingham at the University of Michigan, and the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Applied Mathematics (ERCIM), which consists of the national computer and information science laboratories of 14 European countries. The award supports the establishment of four international working groups to foster an international community of Digital Library researchers and to identify joint research agendas. The working groups will focus on technical issues related to interoperability, metadata, optimized retrieval, and intellectual property and economics. Meetings will be organized to examine and define critical research questions through which joint research proposals will emerge. The University of Michigan serves as the U.S. organizer. Each working group will consist of five U.S. researchers from NSF-supported Digital Library Projects and other research organizations and five European researchers. The project takes advantage of significant European expertise in informatics and applied mathematics and will eventually provide access to a large compendium of scientific information that is produced in Europe. Through this cooperation, common standards and strategies to develop compatible systems and global digital libraries are likely to emerge.
