Objective and Topics

Digital Libraries (DL) is a field of research and development aiming to promote the theory and practice of processing, dissemination, storage, search and analysis of various digital data. Digital Libraries acting as knowledge depositories can be considered as complex information systems, development and use of which require solutions of numerous scientific, technological, methodological, economic, legal and other issues. Development of Digital Libraries technologies is becoming more and more essential for raising standards of health care, education, science and economy, as well as the quality of life on the whole. Projects devoted to the generation of а digital form of the information concerning the Earth, Universe, Literature, Art, Environment and Humans, accumulated by the humanity, are examples of the intensive development of global information repositories.

The information about the first ten RCDL conferences (1999 - St. Petersburg, 2000 - Protvino, 2001 - Petrozavodsk, 2002 - Dubna, 2003 - St. Petersburg, 2004 - Puschino, 2005 - Yaroslavl, 2006 - Suzdal, 2007 - Pereslavl-Zalessky, 2008 - Dubna) can be found at http://www.rcdl.ru/en/.

The principal objective of the series of the conferences is to promote the constituting of a community of Russian experts involved in research related to digital libraries. The Conference offers such a community an opportunity to discuss ideas and outcomes and to make contacts for closer cooperation. The Conference also promotes the study of international experience, the development of the international cooperation on Digital Libraries. That is the reason why papers describing the advanced directions of research and development are especially welcomed. Young authors or co-authors of the projects, presented at the Conferences, can ask for RFBR support in the framework of the annual contest "mob 3 ros" (participation of young scientists in scientific procedures, held in Russia). Taking into consideration the fact that RCDL'2009 and RUSSIR'2009 would be co-located, special measures to involve young participants of RUSSIR'2009 to the active attendance of RCDL'2009 are planned.

More information about such measures will be published at the RCDL'2009 site.
Considerable attention in the RCDL agenda is devoted to practical projects solving complicated problems. RCDL places much focus on the researches aimed to develop Very Large Digital Libraries (VLDL), including application of service-oriented and grid-oriented architectures, maintenance of their quality, promotion of VLDL interoperability and sustainability, development of VLDL management models. The special interest is given to the application of modern scientific approaches in the context of high loads: hundreds of thousands of users, tens of gigabytes of data, terabytes of traffic.

The RCDL program traditionally includes tutorials devoted to the analysis of an up-to-date state in one of the related areas. The significant RCDL aim is to attract young scientists and students to work on actual problems in this sphere: informal opinion exchange between the representatives of science, higher school and industry is planned. The best RCDL papers, prepared by students or postgraduates, will be awarded.

We expect the participation of researchers from Europe and USA, which would contribute to the international information exchange and cooperation
The Conference Proceedings will be published as a collection of full accepted papers, short presentations and abstracts of posters as well as an electronic publication at the Conference Web-site.

Conference topics include the following guidelines and developments in digital libraries:

1. Methods and models for information representation.
2. Metadata, ontologies and instruments for knowledge representation.
3. Perspective infrastructures of digital libraries, digital libraries in grid-environment.
4. Virtual research environments.
5. Social nets and digital libraries.
6. Tools for digital libraries and digital collections creation.
7. Methods and technologies of working with text, multimedia and semistructured information.
8. Information preservation methods and digital archives.
9. Interoperability and integration of information.
10. Scientometrics in digital libraries.
11. Information security.
12. User interfaces, human factors.
13. Digital libraries in science, education, culture, medicine and economics.
14. Technology standards of digital libraries.