Bøger i Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services serien

This lecture introduces fundamental principles of online multiplayer games, primarily massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), suitable for students and faculty interested both in designing games and in doing research on them. The general focus is human-centered computing, which includes many human-computer interaction issues and emphasizes social computing, but also, looks at how the design of socio-economic interactions extends our traditional notions of computer programming to cover human beings as well as machines. In addition, it demonstrates a range of social science research methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative, that could be used by students for term papers, or by their professors for publications. In addition to drawing upon a rich literature about these games, this lecture is based on thousands of hours of first-hand research experience inside many classic examples, including World of Warcraft, The Matrix Online, Anarchy Online, Tabula Rasa, Entropia Universe, Dark Age of Camelot, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings Online, Tale in the Desert, EVE Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and the non-game virtual world Second Life. Among the topics covered are historical-cultural origins of leading games, technical constraints that shape the experience, rolecoding and social control, player personality and motivation, relationships with avatars and characters, virtual professions and economies, social relations inside games, and the implications for the external society. Table of Contents: Introduction / Historical-Cultural Origins / Technical Constraints / Rolecoding and Social Control / Personality and Motivation / Avatars and Characters / Virtual Professions and Economies / Social Relations Inside Games / Implications for External Society

Developments over the last twenty years have fueled considerable speculation about the future of the book and of reading itself. This book begins with a gloss over the history of electronic books, including the social and technical forces that have shaped their development. The focus then shifts to reading and how we interact with what we read: basic issues such as legibility, annotation, and navigation are examined as aspects of reading that ebooks inherit from their print legacy. Because reading is fundamentally communicative, I also take a closer look at the sociality of reading: how we read in a group and how we share what we read. Studies of reading and ebook use are integrated throughout the book, but Chapter 5 "e;goes meta"e; to explore how a researcher might go about designing his or her own reading-related studies. No book about ebooks is complete without an explicit discussion of content preparation, i.e., how the electronic book is written. Hence, Chapter 6 delves into the underlying representation of ebooks and efforts to create and apply markup standards to them. This chapter also examines how print genres have made the journey to digital and how some emerging digital genres might be realized as ebooks. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses some beyond-the-book functionality: how can ebook platforms be transformed into portable personal libraries? In the end, my hope is that by the time the reader reaches the end of this book, he or she will feel equipped to perform the next set of studies, write the next set of articles, invent new ebook functionality, or simply engage in a heated argument with the stranger in seat 17C about the future of reading. Table of Contents: Preface / Figure Credits / Introduction / Reading / Interaction / Reading as a Social Activity / Studying Reading / Beyond the Book / References / Author Biography

The design space of information services evolved from seminal works through a set of prototypical hypermedia systems and matured in open and widely accessible web-based systems. The original concepts of hypermedia systems are now expressed in different forms and shapes. The first works on hypertext invented the term itself, laid out the foundational concept of association or link, and highlighted navigation as the core paradigm for the future information systems. The first engineered systems demonstrated architectural requirements and models and fostered the emergence of the conceptual model related with the information systems and the information design. The artifacts for interaction, navigation, and search, grew from the pioneering systems. Multimedia added a new dimension to hypertext, and mutated the term into hypermedia. The adaptation of the primitive models and mechanisms to the space of continuous media led to a further conceptual level and to the reinvention of information design methods. Hypermedia systems also became an ideal space for collaboration and cooperative work. Information access and sharing, and group work were enabled and empowered by distributed hypermedia systems. As with many technologies, a winning technical paradigm, in our case the World Wide Web, concentrated the design options, the architectural choices and the interaction and navigation styles. Since the late nineties, the Web became the standard framework for hypermedia systems, and integrated a large number of the initial concepts and techniques. Yet, other paths are still open. This lecture maps a simple "e;genome"e; of hypermedia systems, based on an initial survey of primitive systems that established architectural and functional characteristics, or traits. These are analyzed and consolidated using phylogenetic analysis tools, to infer families of systems and evolution opportunities. This method may prove to be inspiring for more systematic perspectives of technological landscapes. Table of Contents: Introduction / Original Visions and Concepts / Steps in the Evolution / Information and Structured Documents / Web-Based Environments / Some Research Trends / A Framework of Traits / A Phylogenetic Analysis / Conclusion

This lecture presents an overview of the Web analytics process, with a focus on providing insight and actionable outcomes from collecting and analyzing Internet data. The lecture first provides an overview of Web analytics, providing in essence, a condensed version of the entire lecture. The lecture then outlines the theoretical and methodological foundations of Web analytics in order to make obvious the strengths and shortcomings of Web analytics as an approach. These foundational elements include the psychological basis in behaviorism and methodological underpinning of trace data as an empirical method. These foundational elements are illuminated further through a brief history of Web analytics from the original transaction log studies in the 1960s through the information science investigations of library systems to the focus on Websites, systems, and applications. Following a discussion of on-going interaction data within the clickstream created using log files and page tagging for analytics of Website and search logs, the lecture then presents a Web analytic process to convert these basic data to meaningful key performance indicators in order to measure likely converts that are tailored to the organizational goals or potential opportunities. Supplementary data collection techniques are addressed, including surveys and laboratory studies. The overall goal of this lecture is to provide implementable information and a methodology for understanding Web analytics in order to improve Web systems, increase customer satisfaction, and target revenue through effective analysis of user-Website interactions. Table of Contents: Understanding Web Analytics / The Foundations of Web Analytics: Theory and Methods / The History of Web Analytics / Data Collection for Web Analytics / Web Analytics Fundamentals / Web Analytics Strategy / Web Analytics as Competitive Intelligence / Supplementary Methods for Augmenting Web Analytics / Search Log Analytics / Conclusion / Key Terms / Blogs for Further Reading / References

Documents usually have a content and a structure. The content refers to the text of the document, whereas the structure refers to how a document is logically organized. An increasingly common way to encode the structure is through the use of a mark-up language. Nowadays, the most widely used mark-up language for representing structure is the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML). XML can be used to provide a focused access to documents, i.e. returning XML elements, such as sections and paragraphs, instead of whole documents in response to a query. Such focused strategies are of particular benefit for information repositories containing long documents, or documents covering a wide variety of topics, where users are directed to the most relevant content within a document. The increased adoption of XML to represent a document structure requires the development of tools to effectively access documents marked-up in XML. This book provides a detailed description of query languages, indexing strategies, ranking algorithms, presentation scenarios developed to access XML documents. Major advances in XML retrieval were seen from 2002 as a result of INEX, the Initiative for Evaluation of XML Retrieval. INEX, also described in this book, provided test sets for evaluating XML retrieval effectiveness. Many of the developments and results described in this book were investigated within INEX. Table of Contents: Introduction / Basic XML Concepts / Historical Perspectives / Query Languages / Indexing Strategies / Ranking Strategies / Presentation Strategies / Evaluating XML Retrieval Effectiveness / Conclusions

We live in an information age that requires us, more than ever, to represent, access, and use information. Over the last several decades, we have developed a modern science and technology for information retrieval, relentlessly pursuing the vision of a "e;memex"e; that Vannevar Bush proposed in his seminal article, "e;As We May Think."e;Faceted search plays a key role in this program. Faceted search addresses weaknesses of conventional search approaches and has emerged as a foundation for interactive information retrieval. User studies demonstrate that faceted search provides more effective information-seeking support to users than best-first search. Indeed, faceted search has become increasingly prevalent in online information access systems, particularly for e-commerce and site search. In this lecture, we explore the history, theory, and practice of faceted search. Although we cannot hope to be exhaustive, our aim is to provide sufficient depth and breadth to offer a useful resource to both researchers and practitioners. Because faceted search is an area of interest to computer scientists, information scientists, interface designers, and usability researchers, we do not assume that the reader is a specialist in any of these fields. Rather, we offer a self-contained treatment of the topic, with an extensive bibliography for those who would like to pursue particular aspects in more depth. Table of Contents: I. Key Concepts / Introduction: What Are Facets? / Information Retrieval / Faceted Information Retrieval / II. Research and Practice / Academic Research / Commercial Applications / III. Practical Concerns / Back-End Concerns / Front-End Concerns / Conclusion / Glossary

Webometrics is concerned with measuring aspects of the web: web sites, web pages, parts of web pages, words in web pages, hyperlinks, web search engine results. The importance of the web itself as a communication medium and for hosting an increasingly wide array of documents, from journal articles to holiday brochures, needs no introduction. Given this huge and easily accessible source of information, there are limitless possibilities for measuring or counting on a huge scale (e.g., the number of web sites, the number of web pages, the number of blogs) or on a smaller scale (e.g., the number of web sites in Ireland, the number of web pages in the CNN web site, the number of blogs mentioning Barack Obama before the 2008 presidential campaign). This book argues that it can be useful for social scientists to measure aspects of the web and explains how this can be achieved on both a small and large scale. The book is intended for social scientists with research topics that are wholly or partly online (e.g., social networks, news, political communication) and social scientists with offline research topics with an online reflection, even if this is not a core component (e.g., diaspora communities, consumer culture, linguistic change). The book is also intended for library and information science students in the belief that the knowledge and techniques described will be useful for them to guide and aid other social scientists in their research. In addition, the techniques and issues are all directly relevant to library and information science research problems. Table of Contents: Introduction / Web Impact Assessment / Link Analysis / Blog Searching / Automatic Search Engine Searches: LexiURL Searcher / Web Crawling: SocSciBot / Search Engines and Data Reliability / Tracking User Actions Online / Advaned Techniques / Summary and Future Directions

As information becomes more ubiquitous and the demands that searchers have on search systems grow, there is a need to support search behaviors beyond simple lookup. Information seeking is the process or activity of attempting to obtain information in both human and technological contexts. Exploratory search describes an information-seeking problem context that is open-ended, persistent, and multifaceted, and information-seeking processes that are opportunistic, iterative, and multitactical. Exploratory searchers aim to solve complex problems and develop enhanced mental capacities. Exploratory search systems support this through symbiotic human-machine relationships that provide guidance in exploring unfamiliar information landscapes. Exploratory search has gained prominence in recent years. There is an increased interest from the information retrieval, information science, and human-computer interaction communities in moving beyond the traditional turn-taking interaction model supported by major Web search engines, and toward support for human intelligence amplification and information use. In this lecture, we introduce exploratory search, relate it to relevant extant research, outline the features of exploratory search systems, discuss the evaluation of these systems, and suggest some future directions for supporting exploratory search. Exploratory search is a new frontier in the search domain and is becoming increasingly important in shaping our future world. Table of Contents: Introduction / Defining Exploratory Search / Related Work / Features of Exploratory Search Systems / Evaluation of Exploratory Search Systems / Future Directions and concluding Remarks

Let us start with a simple scenario: a man asks a woman "e;how high is Mount Everest?"e; The woman replies "e;29,029 feet."e; Nothing could be simpler. Now let us suppose that rather than standing in a room, or sitting on a bus, the man is at his desk and the woman is 300 miles away with the conversation taking place using e-mail. Still simple? Certainly--it happens every day. So why all the bother about digital (virtual, electronic, chat, etc.) reference?If the man is a pilot flying over Mount Everest, the answer matters. If you are a lawyer going to court, the identity of the woman is very important. Also, if you ever want to find the answer again, how that transaction took place matters a lot. Digital reference is a deceptively simple concept on its face: "e;the incorporation of human expertise into the information system."e; This lecture seeks to explore the question of how human expertise is incorporated into a variety of information systems, from libraries, to digital libraries, to information retrieval engines, to knowledge bases. What we learn through this endeavor, begun primarily in the library context, is that the models, methods, standards, and experiments in digital reference have wide applicability. We also catch a glimpse of an unfolding future in which ubiquitous computing makes the identification, interaction, and capture of expertise increasingly important. It is a future that is much more complex than we had anticipated. It is a future in which documents and artifacts are less important than the contexts of their creation and use. Table of Contents: Defining Reference in a Digital Age / Conversations / Digital Reference in Practice / Digital Reference an a New Future / Conclusion

Improvements in network bandwidth along with dramatic drops in digital storage and processing costs have resulted in the explosive growth of multimedia (combinations of text, image, audio, and video) resources on the Internet and in digital repositories. A suite of computer technologies delivering speech, image, and natural language understanding can automatically derive descriptive metadata for such resources. Difficulties for end users ensue, however, with the tremendous volume and varying quality of automated metadata for multimedia information systems. This lecture surveys automatic metadata creation methods for dealing with multimedia information resources, using broadcast news, documentaries, and oral histories as examples. Strategies for improving the utility of such metadata are discussed, including computationally intensive approaches, leveraging multimodal redundancy, folding in context, and leaving precision-recall tradeoffs under user control. Interfaces building from automatically generated metadata are presented, illustrating the use of video surrogates in multimedia information systems. Traditional information retrieval evaluation is discussed through the annual National Institute of Standards and Technology TRECVID forum, with experiments on exploratory search extending the discussion beyond fact-finding to broader, longer term search activities of learning, analysis, synthesis, and discovery. Table of Contents: Evolution of Multimedia Information Systems: 1990-2008 / Survey of Automatic Metadata Creation Methods / Refinement of Automatic Metadata / Multimedia Surrogates / End-User Utility for Metadata and Surrogates: Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Satisfaction

Everybody knows what relevance is. It is a "ya'know" notion, concept, ideäno need to explain whatsoever. Searching for relevant information using information technology (IT) became a ubiquitous activity in contemporary information society. Relevant information means information that pertains to the matter or problem at hand¿it is directly connected with effective communication. The purpose of this book is to trace the evolution and with it the history of thinking and research on relevance in information science and related fields from the human point of view. The objective is to synthesize what we have learned about relevance in several decades of investigation about the notion in information science. This book deals with how people deal with relevance¿it does not cover how systems deal with relevance; it does not deal with algorithms. Spurred by advances in information retrieval (IR) and information systems of various kinds in handling of relevance, a number of basic questionsare raised: But what is relevance to start with? What are some of its properties and manifestations? How do people treat relevance? What affects relevance assessments? What are the effects of inconsistent human relevance judgments on tests of relative performance of different IR algorithms or approaches? These general questions are discussed in detail.

We are well into a second age of digital information. Our information is moving from the desktop to the laptop to the "palmtop" and up into an amorphous cloud on the Web. How can one manage both the challenges and opportunities of this new world of digital information? What does the future hold? This book provides an important update on the rapidly expanding field of personal information management (PIM). Part I (Always and Forever) introduces the essentials of PIM. Information is personal for many reasons. It's the information on our hard drives we couldn't bear to lose. It's the information about us that we don't want to share. It's the distracting information demanding our attention even as we try to do something else. It's the information we don't know about but need to. Through PIM, we control personal information. We integrate information into our lives in useful ways. We make it "ours." With basics established, Part I proceeds to explore a critical interplay between personal information "always" at hand through mobile devices and "forever" on the Web. How does information stay "ours" in such a world?Part II (Building Places of Our Own for Digital Information) will be available in the Summer of 2012, and will consist of the following chapters:Chapter 5. Technologies to eliminate PIM?: We have seen astonishing advances in the technologies of information management -- in particular, to aid in the storing, structuring and searching of information. These technologies will certainly change the way we do PIM; will they eliminate the need for PIM altogether?Chapter 6. GIM and the social fabric of PIM: We don't (and shouldn't) manage our information in isolation. Group information management (GIM) -- especially the kind practiced more informally in households and smaller project teams -- goes hand in glove with good PIM.Chapter 7. PIM by design: Methodologies, principles, questions and considerations as we seek to understand PIM better and to build PIM into our tools, techniques and training.Chapter 8. To each of us, our own.: Just as we must each be a student of our own practice of PIM, we must also be a designer of this practice. This concluding chapter looks at tips, traps and tradeoffs as we work to build a practice of PIM and "places" of our own for personal information.Table of Contents: A New Age of Information / The Basics of PIM / Our Information, Always at Hand / Our Information, Forever on the Web

Visual information retrieval (VIR) is an active and vibrant research area, which attempts at providing means for organizing, indexing, annotating, and retrieving visual information (images and videos) from large, unstructured repositories.The goal of VIR is to retrieve matches ranked by their relevance to a given query, which is often expressed as an example image and/or a series of keywords. During its early years (1995-2000), the research efforts were dominated by content-based approaches contributed primarily by the image and video processing community. During the past decade, it was widely recognized that the challenges imposed by the lack of coincidence between an image's visual contents and its semantic interpretation, also known as semantic gap, required a clever use of textual metadata (in addition to information extracted from the image's pixel contents) to make image and video retrieval solutions efficient and effective. The need to bridge (or at least narrow) the semantic gap has been one of the driving forces behind current VIR research. Additionally, other related research problems and market opportunities have started to emerge, offering a broad range of exciting problems for computer scientists and engineers to work on.In this introductory book, we focus on a subset of VIR problems where the media consists of images, and the indexing and retrieval methods are based on the pixel contents of those images -- an approach known as content-based image retrieval (CBIR). We present an implementation-oriented overview of CBIR concepts, techniques, algorithms, and figures of merit. Most chapters are supported by examples written in Java, using Lucene (an open-source Java-based indexing and search implementation) and LIRE (Lucene Image REtrieval), an open-source Java-based library for CBIR.Table of Contents: Introduction / Information Retrieval: Selected Concepts and Techniques / Visual Features / Indexing Visual Features / LIRE: An Extensible Java CBIR Library / Concluding Remarks

This book is the third of a three-part series on taxonomies, and covers putting your taxonomy into use in as many ways as possible to maximize retrieval for your users. Chapter 1 suggests several items to research and consider before you start your implementation and integration process. It explores the different pieces of software that you will need for your system and what features to look for in each. Chapter 2 launches with a discussion of how taxonomy terms can be used within a workflow, connecting twöor more¿taxonomies, and intelligent coordination of platforms and taxonomies. Microsoft SharePoint is a widely used and popular program, and I consider their use of taxonomies in this chapter. Following that is a discussion of taxonomies and semantic integration and then the relationship between indexing and the hierarchy of a taxonomy. Chapter 3 (¿How is a Taxonomy Connected to Search?¿) provides discussions and examples of putting taxonomies into use in practical applications. Itdiscusses displaying content based on search, how taxonomy is connected to search, using a taxonomy to guide a searcher, tools for search, including search engines, crawlers and spiders, and search software, the parts of a search-capable system, and then how to assemble that search-capable system. This chapter also examines how to measure quality in search, the different kinds of search, and theories on search from several famous theoreticians¿two from the 18th and 19th centuries, and two contemporary. Following that is a section on inverted files, parsing, discovery, and clustering. While you probably don¿t need a comprehensive understanding of these concepts to build a solid, workable system, enough information is provided for the reader to see how they fit into the overall scheme. This chapter concludes with a look at faceted search and some possibilities for search interfaces. Chapter 4, ¿Implementing a Taxonomy in a Database or on a Website,¿ starts where many content systems really should¿with the authors, or at least the people who create the content. This chapter discusses matching up various groups of related data to form connections, data visualization and text analytics, and mobile and e-commerce applications for taxonomies. Finally, Chapter 5 presents some educated guesses about the future of knowledge organization. Table of Contents: List of Figures / Preface / Acknowledgments / On Your Mark, Get Ready ¿. WAIT! Things to Know Before You Start the Implementation Step / Taxonomy and Thesaurus Implementation / How is a Taxonomy Connected to Search? / Implementing a Taxonomy in a Database or on a Website / What Lies Ahead for Knowledge Organization? / Glossary / End Notes / Author Biography

Searching the Internet and the ability to competently use search engines are increasingly becoming an important part of children¿s daily lives. Whether mobile or at home, children use search interfaces to explore personal interests, complete academic assignments, and have social interaction. However, engaging with search also means engaging with an ever-changing and evolving search landscape. There are continual software updates, multiple devices used to search (e.g., phones, tablets), an increasing use of social media, and constantly updated Internet content. For young searchers, this can require infinite adaptability or mean being hopelessly confused. This book offers a perspective centered on children¿s search experiences as a whole instead of thinking of search as a process with separate and potentially problematic steps. Reading the prior literature with a child-centered view of search reveals that children have been remarkably consistent over time as searchers, displaying the same search strategies regardless of the landscape of search. However, no research has synthesized these consistent patterns in children¿s search across the literature, and only recently have these patterns been uncovered as distinct search roles, or searcher types. Based on a four-year longitudinal study on children¿s search experiences, this book weaves together the disparate evidence in the literature through the use of 9 search roles for children ages 7-15. The search role framework has a distinct advantage because it encourages adult stakeholders to design children¿s search tools to support and educate children at their existing levels of search strength and deficit, rather than expecting children to adapt to a transient search landscape.

With the rapid growth of web search in recent years the problem of modeling its users has started to attract more and more attention of the information retrieval community. This has several motivations. By building a model of user behavior we are essentially developing a better understanding of a user, which ultimately helps us to deliver a better search experience. A model of user behavior can also be used as a predictive device for non-observed items such as document relevance, which makes it useful for improving search result ranking. Finally, in many situations experimenting with real users is just infeasible and hence user simulations based on accurate models play an essential role in understanding the implications of algorithmic changes to search engine results or presentation changes to the search engine result page. In this survey we summarize advances in modeling user click behavior on a web search engine result page. We present simple click models as well as more complex models aimed at capturing non-trivial user behavior patterns on modern search engine result pages. We discuss how these models compare to each other, what challenges they have, and what ways there are to address these challenges. We also study the problem of evaluating click models and discuss the main applications of click models.

The Answer Machine is a practical, non-technical guide to the technologies behind information seeking and analysis. It introduces search and content analytics to software buyers, knowledge managers, and searchers who want to understand and design effective online environments. The book describes how search evolved from an expert-only to an end user tool. It provides an overview of search engines, categorization and clustering, natural language processing, content analytics, and visualization technologies. Detailed profiles for Web search, eCommerce search, eDiscovery, and enterprise search contrast the types of users, uses, tasks, technologies, and interaction designs for each. These variables shape each application, although the underlying technologies are the same. Types of information tasks and the trade-offs between precision and recall, time, volume and precision, and privacy vs. personalization are discussed within this context. The book examines trends toward convenient, context-aware computing, big data and analytics technologies, conversational systems, and answer machines. The Answer Machine explores IBM Watson's DeepQA technology and describes how it is used to answer health care and Jeopardy questions. The book concludes by discussing the implications of these advances: how they will change the way we run our businesses, practice medicine, govern, or conduct our lives in the digital age. Table of Contents: Introduction / The Query Process and Barriers to Finding Information Online / Online Search: An Evolution / Search and Discovery Technologies: An Overview / Information Access: A Spectrum of Needs and Uses / Future Tense: The Next Era in Information Access and Discovery / Answer Machines

This book focuses on the methodologies, organization, and communication of digital image collection research that utilizes social media content. ("Image" is here understood as a cultural, conventional, and commercial¿stock photörepresentation.) The lecture offers expert views that provide different interpretations of images and their potential implementations. Linguistic and semiotic methodologies as well as eye-tracking research are employed to both analyze images and comprehend how humans consider them, including which salient features generally attract viewers' attention.This literature review covers image¿specifically photographic¿research since 2005, when major social media platforms emerged. A citation analysis includes an overview of co-citation maps that demonstrate the nexus of image research literature and the journals in which they appear. Eye tracking tests whether scholarly templates focus on the proper features of an image, such as people, objects, time, etc.,and if a prescribed theme affects the eye movements of the observer. The results may point to renewed requirements for building image search engines. As it stands, image management already requires new algorithms and a new understanding that involves text recognition and very large database processing.The aim of this book is to present different image research areas and demonstrate the challenges image research faces. The book's scope is, by necessity, far from comprehensive, since the field of digital image research does not cover fake news, image manipulation, mobile photos, etc.; these issues are very complex and need a publication of their own. This book should primarily be useful for students in library and information science, psychology, and computer science.

Many data-intensive applications that use machine learning or artificial intelligence techniques depend on humans providing the initial dataset, enabling algorithms to process the rest or for other humans to evaluate the performance of such algorithms. Not only can labeled data for training and evaluation be collected faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before, but we now see the emergence of hybrid human-machine software that combines computations performed by humans and machines in conjunction. There are, however, real-world practical issues with the adoption of human computation and crowdsourcing. Building systems and data processing pipelines that require crowd computing remains difficult. In this book, we present practical considerations for designing and implementing tasks that require the use of humans and machines in combination with the goal of producing high-quality labels.

European digital libraries have existed in diverse forms and with quite different functions, priorities, and aims. However, there are some common features of European-based initiatives that are relevant to non-European communities. There are now many more challenges and changes than ever before, and the development rate of new digital libraries is ever accelerating. Delivering educational, cultural, and research resources-especially from major scientific and cultural organizations-has become a core mission of these organizations. Using these resources they will be able to investigate, educate, and elucidate, in order to promote and disseminate and to preserve civilization. Extremely important in conceptualizing the digital environment priorities in Europe was its cultural heritage and the feeling that these rich resources should be open to Europe and the global community.In this book we focus on European digitized heritage and digital culture, and its potential in the digital age. We specifically look at the EU and its approaches to digitization and digital culture, problems detected, and achievements reached, all with an emphasis on digital cultural heritage. We seek to report on important documents that were prepared on digitization; copyright and related documents; research and education in the digital libraries field under the auspices of the EU; some other European and national initiatives; and funded projects.The aim of this book is to discuss the development of digital libraries in the European context by presenting, primarily to non-European communities interested in digital libraries, the phenomena, initiatives, and developments that dominated in Europe. We describe the main projects and their outcomes, and shine a light on the number of challenges that have been inspiring new approaches, cooperative efforts, and the use of research methodology at different stages of the digital libraries development. The specific goals are reflected in the structure of the book, which can be conceived as a guide to several main topics and sub-topics. However, the author¿s scope is far from being comprehensive, since the field of digital libraries is very complex and digital libraries for cultural heritage is even moreso.