Proceedings of the First Workshop on Very Large Digital Libraries (VLDL2008)

In todays information society the demand for Digital Libraries is changing. The implementation of nowadays Digital Libraries is more demanding than in the past. Information consumers are facing with the need to have access to an ever growing and heterogeneous information space while information providers are interested in satisfying such needs by providing rich and organised views over such information deluge. Because of their fundamental role of information production and dissemination vehicle, Digital Libraries are also expected to provide information society with services that must be available 24/7 and guarantee the expected quality of service. This scenario leads to the development of Large-Scale Digital Libraries in terms of number of Information Objects and Collections to be made available, users to be served and potentially distributed resources needed to implement such systems. Such systems have to confront with new challenges in a context having scalability, interoperability and sustainability as focal points. The need for concrete solutions can be seen also in the substantial amount of resources invested by the European Union towards the creation of a unifying European Information Space, starting with DELOS, BRICKS, DILIGENT and DRIVER in the past, and continuing with D4Science (a DILIGENT follow on), DRIVER-II, CLARIN, SAPIR and finally with the European Digital Library, a major effort to build a European-scale digital library to make available to everybody the rich cultural assets of the whole Europe. New approaches and technologies have been devised to appropriately tackle the various matters arising in deploying large-scale Digital Library systems. The goal of this workshop is to provide researchers, practitioners and application developers with a forum fostering a constructive exchange among all of such key actors.