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The theme of the 1997 ASIS Annual Meeting was "Digital Collections: implications for users, funders, developers and maintainers."
The meeting concentrated on the emerging phenomenon of collections of digital objects — text, image, sound, and multimedia — accumulated in central as well as distributed repositories or virtual collections. Topics addressed included research, technical, cultural, political, economic, and other key issues for users, funders, developers, and maintainers. These themes were elaborated by keynote and invited speakers, and through refereed papers, panels, technical sessions, and other presentations which addressed the following aspects of digital collections.
 Users. Who are the users? What are their capabilities and needs?
What are the benefits for users? What are useful evaluation mechanisms? What existing research is applicable? What research needs to be done? What is the bigger social, political, and commercial context into which
digital collections fit? What are the negative impacts? How can the bandwidth and server gap between multimedia and text browsers be overcome? How will access be guaranteed?
 Funders. What are the funding sources? What are their political
and commercial expectations? How can funding be secured to digitize less profitable subject areas such as the arts and humanities? How can collaboration and cooperation be encouraged? What are the funding
realities? What returns can be expected on the investments? How can these returns be realized?
 Developers. What are the practical technical applications? What are the current and future technical architectures? What current research is
applicable? What research needs to be done? What are the issues of intellectual access?
 Maintainers. How will digital collections be maintained? What are the information management issues? What tools are needed for
managing collections (both high-end "quality" collections and personal or small user community collections)? How can the authenticity, validity, and reliability of objects be identified and maintained?
©1997
409 pages, Softbound, ISBN:1-57387-048-X |
