TCDL Bulletin
Fall 2007
Volume 3   Issue 3

José Borbinha
INESC-ID (http://www.inesc-id.pt)
Information Systems Group (Grupo de Sistemas de Informação)

Lillian Cassel
Villanova University (http://csc.villanova.edu/)
Department of Computing Science

The 10th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2006) was held in Alicante, Spain, from 17 to 22 September 2006 (http://www.ecdl2006.org). Within the scope of ECDL 2006, the 2^nd ECDL Doctoral Consortium (DC) was also organised, and took place September 17. The purpose of the DC was to challenge Ph.D. students to present their research proposals to a group of senior advisers and, in return, receive the advisors' comments and suggestions.

Seven students, each of which had been born in a different country and two of which were doing their Ph.D. work outside of their native country, participated in this DC.

The DC Committee itself was comprised of fourteen members representing six different countries. It would be difficult to ask for a more international event.

Each student was allotted 20 minutes to present his/her work to their colleagues and the members of the DC Committee. Immediately after each presentation a 20-minute discussion about the presentation was held. (All of these were open and very interesting group discussions.)

Concerning their main research challenges, we might group the students as follows:

• Two students are particularly interested in user issues: Hanen Frej (born in Tunisia but a Ph.D. student in France) is focused on personalisation and user profiles, while Patricia Souto (born in Brazil but a Ph.D. student in the UK) is focused on information seeking.
• Two other students' work reflect their special concerns regarding scope or domain issues: Stephann Makri (from the UK) is focused in information seeking in the domain of legal information, and the work of Susan L. Price (from the USA) is concerned with the health and medical domain.
• Another two students are conducting research on user interfaces: Jolanta Mizera-Pietraszko (from Poland) is focusing her research on the problem of generic user interfaces for multilingual digital libraries, and Metin Cavus (from Turkey) is focused on the problem of video summarization.
• The seventh student, Satoko Fujisawa (from Japan), has expressed her interest in automatic extracted metadata about persons and the detection of their roles and relations with digital objects.

At the end of the DC, all the students were invited to produce more detailed and revised versions of their original papers, taking into consideration the feedback they had received from the DC advisors. All the students accepted the challenge, which has resulted in this issue of the IEEE TCDL Bulletin. ECDL DC 2006 was the second time that the DC was organized within the scope of the ECDL series of conferences, following of the success of the 2005 ECDL DC. And the 2007 DC has very recently taken place, making the ECDL DCs a tradition of which the organizers are justly proud.

© Copyright 2007 José Borbinha and Lillian Cassel

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