Schedule of Events: Workshops

ACM SIGIR'01 Workshop on Open Archives: Communities, Interoperability, and Services New Orleans, Louisiana, September 13, 2001

CALL FOR PAPERS

OBJECTIVE

This workshop aims to promote interoperability among open archives and digital libraries. It will help in the building of (1) services to support such interoperability, and (2) communities interested in working together to share information.

This workshop will allow those involved in the Open Archives Initiative (OAI, www.openarchives.org), and those wishing to become involved, to extend the Initiative through (a) sharing of technology, (b) description and demonstration of services, and (c) community-based discussion of conventions that ensure interoperability. Groups of people interested in applying OAI through collaborative, federated, and distributed activities are encouraged to use this workshop as a way to plan their future coordinated work in connection with OAI.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

In general, this workshop will include an introduction to OAI and provide technology sharing and community building opportunities. With regard to OAI and related technology, the following topics will be discussed:

• OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
• Interoperability needs of individual communities
• Building cross-archive services
• Creating standards to support community-wide services
• Evaluation of the work done thus far
• Research issues
• Organization of the OAI
• Future directions of the OAI

Part of the workshop will be devoted to group discussions. Some may focus on some of the above mentioned topics. But it is expected that most groups will represent various communities. Thus grouping may be based on genre, e.g., those working with: educational resources, preprint services, technical reports, electronic theses and dissertations. Other groupings may be based on discipline, e.g., physics, chemistry, computing, information retrieval.

WORKSHOP CHAIRS

• Edward A. Fox (Chair), Virginia Tech (member of OAI Steering Committee)
• Hussein Suleman (Co-Chair), Virginia Tech (member of OAI Technical Committee)

PARTICIPATION

Expected audience: Archivists, librarians, publishers, researchers and representatives of user communities with an interest in interoperability of digital library systems and the building of services to support user communities.

This will be an open meeting with selection of participants based on submissions to the Chairs giving:

• a one paragraph summary of prior or planned involvement in the Open Archives Initiative;
• a position statement of not more than 1000 words (half on what a person can contribute to the meeting topics and half on their background/prior work);
• a list of others applying to attend with whom community discussions might proceed (if known).

Submissions should be sent in ASCII or MS-Word form. All submissions will be reviewed by the organizers. The position statements of invited participants will be reproduced and distributed at the workshop.

CORRESPONDENCE

Please send all correspondence to both fox@vt.edu and hussein@vt.edu

IMPORTANT DATES

• Submission (position statement): July 16, 2001
• Notification of acceptance: July 31, 2001
• Final submission (of revised position statement):
• August 15, 2001 Workshop: September 13, 2001

FURTHER INFORMATION

Background on OAI: The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes standards that aim to facilitate efficient dissemination of content. Its goal is to to serve communities wishing to share any type of information by ensuring interoperability and componentized, layered services. OAI was launched in October 1999 to provide a forum to discuss and solve problems of interoperability, initially among author self-archiving solutions. Now OAI aims to support all archives, both those focused on e-prints (e.g., preprints and reprints, often connected with journals and conferences) and those representing a wide variety of other content types (e.g., theses and dissertations, Web log files, and educational resources). The emphasis has been on allowing harvesting of metadata that describes diverse "records" of content, stored in managed repositories.

See also website at http://purl.org/net/oaisept01