APPROACH

NSF and DARPA defined the scope of the study in meetings in early 1997. WTEC then recruited a panel of U.S. experts, chaired by Raj Reddy, Dean of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. The panel is shown in Table 1.1, along with others who helped with the research in Japan and in producing the results. Short vitas are in Appendices A and B.

The study was initiated at a kickoff meeting held in Arlington, Virginia in November 1997. WTEC staff then conducted a literature search, including a survey of possible sites prepared by David Kanhaner of ATIP. Cecil Uyehara worked with Hiroshi Morishita in Japan to make arrangements for the panel's study tour in Japan. WTEC established a Web site at the outset of the study to publicize it to the research community (Horning 1997).

During March 21-28, 1998, panelists visited the 18 sites shown in Table 1.2 by dividing the group into two teams. Complete systems were seen at the museum and universities, the National Diet Library, NACSIS, NAIST, Nikkei, and Toppan. The other sites typically demonstrated a half-dozen projects of enabling technologies. Appendix C contains detailed reports from each location.

The panel held a day-long workshop in Arlington, Virginia on May 12, 1998. More than 80 people attended, including representatives of the leading U.S. companies and Federal agencies concerned with this field. The panelists delivered presentations on the vision of all authored works online, the hardware and software architecture for delivering such vast databases, text search and retrieval systems, image databases issues, metadata methods for digital libraries, and the economic, policy, educational applications and intellectual property aspects of digital libraries. Two of the panelists were unable to be at the workshop, and Ronald Larsen and Lawrence Goldberg presented their materials. The slide presentations from the workshop are available on the Web (Tamburello 1998).