Foundations of digital libraries II. Pre-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on foundations of digital libraries, Budapest, Hungary, September 20, 2007

Preface The present volume contains the papers that will be discussed at the Workshop on"Foundations of Digital Libraries", to be held in Budapest, Hungary, on September 20,2007, in conjunction with the 11th European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL).This is the second workshop in a series dedicated to digital library modelling in general.The first one was held in Vancouver, BC, Canada, on June 23, 2007, in conjunctionwith the 2007 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). The series of workshopsis largely motivated by a major effort to obtain a unified Reference Model for DigitalLibraries that has been launched and supported for the past two years by the DELOSNetwork of Excellence on Digital Libraries, a project supported by the European Commission.The first workshop aimed at contributing to the foundations for digital libraries as awhole. For this workshop,most of the submitted papers have been more specialized andhave mostly concentrated on one of the fundamental components of Digital Libraries,i.e., Content. In particular, the selected papers have given attention to architectural aspectsof Digital Library services for content abstraction, memorization, and manipulation,as well to several models and functionalities that are critical for advanced contentmanagement. We expect that these papers will stimulate an interesting discussion thatwill contribute to further enhancing the on-going modelling work.In addition, the first workshop served to make the work on the definition of the ReferenceModel and other related activities more widely known.We hope that the secondworkshop will serve as a vehicle to further expand the circle of people interested in consolidatingthe key concepts in the field of Digital Libraries and in participating in futurecollaborative activities in this direction. Definition of a comprehensive and universallyaccepted model will have great influence on the development of future Digital Librarysystems, but reaching that goal requires everyones contributions in a community effort.September 2007 Donatella Castelli - ISTI-CNR, Pisa, ItalyYannis Ioannidis - University of Athens, Hellas