Pre-proceedings of the First Internatinal Workshop on Foundations of Digital Libraries

We are happy to present the papers to be discussed at the 2007 JCDL Workshop on "Foundations of Digital Libraries". This workshop is the first one dedicated to this very fascinating theme, that has gained increasing interest in recent years, although attention to digital libraries (DLs) dates from many years ago. It is not surprising that DL researchers feel the need of foundations for the Digital Libraries field. The DL universe, in fact, has continued to grow in the last fifteen years and has become a very complex one, producing very heterogeneous models and systems. Now DL researchers are aware that foundations are urgent to avoid that the results of their work are difficult to confront and even harder to combine and reuse to produce enhanced outcomes. The papers that will be presented for discussion in this workshop aim to contribute to laying the foundations for digital libraries as a whole, as well as continuing the work on the definition of a Reference Model for Digital Libraries launched by the EU DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries. The common goal is to produce a reference framework wherein new results can be in- tegrated, compared, and discussed.With this view, the workshop gives particular attention to the modeling of three of the main aspects characterizing the Digital Library universe: Content, Architecture, and Quality, in order to contribute to the consolidation of these key concepts. In each of the sections dedicated to these arguments, a number of papers are offered, beginning with those dedicated to the motivations for and approaches to DL foundational work. Besides researchers, other important communities are interested in the essence of the DL fields, i.e., library users and library providers. We have no doubt that the results of this workshop also will give these communities a better understand-ing of the DL universe and the opportunity of reasoning about this universe and communicating with a common and well founded concept vocabulary.