US-Korea Joint Workshop on Digital Libraries: Removing Barriers to International Collaboration on Research and Education through Digital Libraries

Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University, Blacksburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal is to fund a US-Korea Joint Workshop on Digital Libraries. This small planning workshop is the first with an Asian country. The globalization of the internet and associated information infrastructure now offers the promise of creating international digital libraries whose resources are distributed and are capable of managing content originally created in multiple languages, formats, media, and social and organizational contexts. The barriers to achieving progress in worldwide development of digital libraries are particularly difficult between nations with very different languages and cultures. To achieve this "next level" of knowledge infrastructure requires collaborative efforts in research areas including: (1) multi-lingual information systems, cross-language retrieval systems, language translation, and language teaching software; (2) multi-national content development including sound, data, image, ultimedia, and software; (3) interoperability and scalability technology to permit extremely large world-wide collections; (4) metadata techniques and tools The workshop has three primary goals. First, it will work to identify ways to reduce the barriers to increased collaborative efforts between US and Korean researchers. Second it will explore technical advances and research environments needed to facilitate US-Korea collaboration related to digital libraries research and educational applications. Third, it will attempt to produce generalizable strategies and approaches for extending and employing digital libraries technologies across radically different textual and cultural materials.