In 2008, the ACM IEEE Joint conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2008) occurred in Pittsburgh, PA. RonaldLarsen of the University of Pittsburgh was general chair. Andreas Paepcke of Stanford University, José Borbinha, INESC-ID, Portugal and Mor Naaman of Yahoo! Research Berkeley shared the responsibilities of chairing the program committee. The conference theme was especially appropriate to a technical conference in a city where three rivers meet: Bridging Culture – Bridging Technology. The posters and demonstrations illustrated that theme by spanning technology innovations as well as cultural context

All the posters and demonstrations are represented in the conference proceedings with one-page abstracts. The lead authors were invited to expand and update their abstracts for this issue. The short presentations in this issue include links to more information about each project and the authors. From a curation lifecycle to curriculum evaluation and from a relation browser tool for faceted exploration to the exploitation of log files in retrieving video; from energy research to biodiversity, this collection represents the richness of the digital library field as represented at a major conference activity. The full proceedings contains more work by some of these authors and by others. This is a sample, to whet your appetite. Look at the full story of the 2008 conference and then look for updates and new activities represented at the 2009 event.

It was a pleasure to work with these authors and I am happy to present this sample for your enjoyment.

Boots Cassel