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The cooperation DELOS-The European Library has been structured into four Tasks, described below and and will focus primarily on the integration of DELOS into the existing "The European Library" system.

Participants: CNR-ISTI, UoA, UG, Univ. of Basel, TEL-ELO
DELOS contact points: Donatella Castelli and Heiko Schuldt
TEL contact points: Sally Chambers and Jose Borbinha

An important task in the process of defining the DELOS digital library reference model is its validation against the requirements of concrete digital libraries and existing digital library management systems. During two joint working meetings the main goals of Task A have been defined: (i) the expertise of the TEL participants (especially members of the TEL Technical Working Group TWG) will bring into the reference model activities valuable input for its refinement; (ii) similarly, the conceptual framework resulting from reference model will provide valuable input to TEL for the extension/refinement of the architecture of The European Library.

TEL has a business process-oriented view on requirements for digital libraries. The DELOS view is bottom-up, trying to identify basic digital library services. A major outcome of the validation of the reference model will be an attempt to map the business process-oriented view to the reference model to basic digital library services.

In the short term, the following steps are planned.

• DELOS provides to the European Library Office (ELO) a draft version of the reference model document in the March/April time frame.
• The ELO will circulate the draft within the TEL community and will collect feedback from different groups, e.g. business level, technical level, service-oriented level.
• The TEL-TWG will attempt to describe the existing TEL system in terms of the reference model (including the identification of gaps, differences etc.).
• The results of these activities will be discussed at the forthcoming meeting of the TEL-TWG, where the input of TEL to the reference model will be consolidated and integrated.
• Finally, appropriate TEL representatives will participate in the DELOS Digital Library Reference Model workshop, scheduled to be held in late May 2006, which will bring together experts in the digital library area, with the aim of producing a revised version of the reference model.

The mid-term cooperation will capitalize on the results of an on-going Task of DELOS (in the Architecture cluster) aimed at integrating different digital library services (provided by the DELOS partners) into an existing middleware platform (OSIRIS Work-flow platform). The resulting "integrated prototype" should provide a concrete example of an implementation of the reference architecture, and be a test-bed for digital library functionality. Currently, TEL runs a metadata repository over the different national libraries giving links to documents in the partner organizations. The services and the infrastructure provided by the integrated prototype might be used by TEL for implementing value-added services of The European Library.

In order to obtain results based on real-world data, DELOS will harvest TEL metadata and make use of them in the integrated prototype, possibly also adding links to the TEL metadata in the services implemented within the integrated prototype. On the basis of those results, TEL will be able to evaluate the possibility of testing, integrating or adding to the TEL architecture some of the services developed within the integrated prototype.

Participants: ISTI, UNIPD, TEL-ELO
DELOS contact points: Carol Peters, Martin Braschler, Maristella Agosti
TEL contact points: Julie Verleyen, Maja Zumer, Genevieve Clavel

The ultimate goal of this task is to provide the capability to users of TEL to access and search the library in their own (or preferred) language, retrieve documents in other languages and have the results presented in an interpretable fashion (e.g. possibly with a summary of the contents in their chosen language). The problem is complex and many factors are involved. These include: the number of languages involved, the current heterogeneous setup of TEL, the lexical tools and resources needed.

• Number of Languages. The number of different languages represented in TEL constitutes a major hurdle for Multi-Lingual Information Access (MLIA), as ideally it should be possible to launch a query in any one of the national languages of the TEL collections and retrieve relevant material in any one of the collections. Possible approaches to the problem might be the use of multilingual ontologies, metadata and subject authority data, similar document search.
• Heterogeneous set-up. A major problem is represented by the heterogeneous set up of TEL, as it is not clear whether the existing infrastructure is able to accept a cross-language query result.
• Resources Needed. Any cross-language strategy implies the acquisition and development of appropriate lexical tools and linguistic resources such as stemmers, morphologies, bilingual dictionaries, etc.

The implementation of MLIA in TEL is an ambitious task that can be considered a medium/long-term goal, to be achieved through a series of intermediate steps. These should be defined and an implementation plan stipulated in the short-term. The first step is therefore the establishment of a joint DELOS/TEL working group to perform a feasibility study aimed at producing the following output:

• Guidelines as to how the TEL infrastructure should be adapted to be ready for the requirements of multilingual access and output
• Guidelines for the preparation of multilingual textual resources, which will be included into TEL (either digitized from existing text or borne digital)
• Definition of strategies that should be adopted by TEL with respect to enabling TEL users to search in their preferred language and retrieve documents in other languages
• Identification of the most promising possible implementation directions: linking metadata, similar document search, etc.

It is planned to hold a one-day joint workshop, with TEL participants bringing a good inside technical knowledge of the TEL system and DELOS participants bringing good hands-on experience in MLIA system development. Based on the results of the workshop, the feasibility study and on the availability of actual resources, a detailed plan for the medium/long term activities will be defined by the end of the third quarter of 2006.

Participants: UoA, UNIPD, MPII, TEL-ELO
DELOS contact points: Yannis Ioannidis, Maristella Agosti, Gerhard Weikum
TEL contact points: Jill Cousins, Theo van Veen

The final objective of this task is to produce guidelines and prototype software for new added-value services of interest to the final users, initially selecting those services that present a lower-risk of failure when personalized. A first short-term objective (spanning approximately one year) is addressing the development of personalization guidelines, and a second medium-term objective (spanning approximately two years) will address integration and testing of existing prototype software and development of possible improvements.

The initial personalization topics to explore are listed below. The exploration will start with a study of the existing access logs from TEL, in order to perform an analysis and categorization of context, to derive specifications for new types of logged data and suggestions on the design of innovative personalized services:

• query expansion (e.g. given a query related to "stars", distinguish between a hobby astronomer versus a cosmology researcher)
• profile building
• notification about new material based on profiles
• recommendations based on profile similarity
• annotation sharing based on profiles
• provision of added-value links and/or service (e.g. OpenURL, etc.), based on preferences and rights of user or organization.

For the short-term objective the expected results are a preliminary study of TEL logs in the second quarter of 2006 (the study is any case a valuable input to DELOS, since it is based on real-world data), and a more comprehensive report before the year's end, containing suggestions for added-value personalized services based on their potential and user-perceived relevance. For the medium-term objective it is expected to have by mid-2007 an initial prototype of a toolkit for log analysis and personalization services, in order to perform jointly an evaluation of the prototype and produce by November 2007 a refined toolkit and a final report containing agreed guidelines for personalized services.

DELOS contact points: Giuseppe Santucci, Pasquale Pagano, Andy Rauber, Norbert Fuhr
TEL contact points: Eric van der Meulen, Max Kaiser

This task addresses the overall design of the TEL user interface, as well as the exploration of additional services, especially for supporting query formulation, collection navigation and results visualization. The activities in the short-medium term will focus on four topics:

Evaluation. As part of an on-going task in DELOS (in the Evaluation cluster), we are preparing a comparative evaluation between the current TEL interface and an appropriate variant of Daffodil (www.daffodil.de). This evaluation will follow both an analytical and an empirical approach. The goal of the analytical evaluation is to assess the functional similarities and differences between the two systems. The goal of the empirical evaluation is to evaluate how well each tool supports the users needs.
The analytical evaluation will consider the usability, functions for search, browsing and result display, and the feedback/help functions of both. For this purpose, the methodology and the questionnaires developed by DELOS WP4 will be used. The empirical evaluation will be based on a user-centered and qualitative approach. Its focus is on the users experience with the tools, considering user characteristics, preferences and strategies, the types of activities/tasks users perform, and the environment in which the search tool is used.

Support for query formulation. The Daffodil interface already provides functions that help the user in formulating better queries. Most basic, a built-in spell checker will flag search terms not contained in the dictionary, and will propose correct variants. For advanced query formulations, a syntax checker will point out syntactically incorrect formulations. Finally, there is a 'related term' tool that proposes (statistically) similar terms for any of the query terms entered. The comparative evaluation will show to what extent these tools are useful for the TEL users, and then possible integration into the TEL system will be discussed.

Virtual collections and navigation. It is planned to provide and test an add-on service for building virtual digital collections starting from a set of real ones. For the definition of the virtual collections, the service should distinguish between expert users (like technicians and librarians) and end users. The service relies on automatic batch techniques of indexing, clustering, and classification of existing collections, allowing a visual navigation of their content, for an easier definition of the virtual collections. The benefits expected are that the user can be presented with cross collection views, can deal with smaller set of more relevant data and therefore queries can be processed in a faster way.

Presentation/visualization of results. The Daffodil system already provides functions for relevance ranking or quick filtering of results, as well as extracting attributes like author names or frequent terms from the result set. In addition, it is planned to provide and test an add-on service that allows end users to interact with the query result in a more effective way. Several techniques can be used in this context: real time indexing, cluster-gather algorithms, smart use of relevance factor, information visualization techniques. One of the objectives of this activity is to understand which of those techniques are more useful in the TEL environment, in addition to motivate the end users to explore more large datasets and have "more fun" while exploring TEL. Also expert users like librarians could use this service to better visualize (and hence understand) the results produced by the navigation service described above, in order to define more easily customized views for end users.

DELOS Demo Day, BnF, Paris, 01-02-2006

• Agenda 
• Open D-Lib: service oriented DLMS , Pasquale Pagano, ISTI-CNR
• DAFFODIL: user oriented access to heterogeneous digital libraries , Klaus-Peter Klas, Duisburg University
• SOMLib-based Interfaces to Digital Bibliotheken , Rudolf Mayer, Vienna Technical University
• Eurovision: a text-based cross-language image retrieval system , Paul Clough, Sheffield University
• Content based retrieval of images and 3D models , Stefano Berretti, Florence University
• Annotation in Digital Bibliotheken , Emanuele Panizzi, Rome 1 University
• Linking Paper and Digital  and brochure , Moira Norrie, ETH Zurich

DELOS - The European Library Brainstorming Meeting, Juan-les-Pins, France 5+6-12-2005

• A report for CENL Executive Committee 
• Agenda 
• Points for DELOS Brainstorming Meeting 
• Topic bid – What we like and what we don't like 
• Interesting things for The European Library Office to investigate from the DELOS meeting 
• Multilingual Meeting - Notes 
• Online Consultation - The Questions... 
• Challenges sheet 
• User Challenges 
• Notes from User Challenges Discussion Group 
• Discussion Group on User Challenges 

Joint DELOS/The European Library Workshop, British Library, London, 15-09-2005

• Agenda 
• The European Library  by Jill Cousins
• DELOS Highlights  by Costantino Thanos
• Multilingual Information Access for Digital Bibliotheken  by Carol Peters
• From digital library management systems to digital library infrastructures  by Donatella Castelli
• DAFFODIL - Effective Support for Using Digital Bibliotheken  by Norbert Fuhr