Vannevar Bush, in a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, provided a vision of a system to disseminate and manage the vast amount of information accumulated by people. After 50 years, his vision is being realized by information highways, information infrastructures, digital libraries, and many other information services-all made possible through advances in computer science and engineering, information technology, and communications networks.
Although there have been several important conference proceedings and special journal issues on digital libraries, new research papers with in-depth technical content are still very much needed to broaden and strengthen this interdisciplinary field. Research must continue to explore the unknowns, expand the boundaries, and overcome the many barriers to digital libraries. This special issue of the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation focuses on a number of technical research issues motivated by digital libraries which are central to the readers of this journal. The editors hope that readers will become more interested in research on digital libraries, and will bring their expertise in visual communication and image representation to this exciting field in the near future.
The papers included in this special issue address various topics concerning digital libraries. Some papers are directly relevant to visual communication and image representation. Other papers are of a more general nature, but are essential to visual communication and image representation.
The first four papers are directly concerned with visual communications and image representation. The paper by R. J. Fateman, T. Tokuyasu, B. P. Berman, and N. Mitchell deals with optical character recognition and 2-D parsing of typeset mathematics. The paper by Su-Shing Chen considers the general issue of indexing spatial objects in digital libraries and a specific application to molecular biology. The paper by G. Ahanger and T. D. C. Little provides a survey of technologies for parsing and indexing digital video. The paper by E. Hwang and V. S. Subrahmanian develops a simple SQL-like query language for video libraries.
The remaining three papers address some important topics concerning distributed digital libraries and information services. The paper by J. C. French and C. L. Viles investigates effective retrieval in distributed digital libraries, and reports on the distributed NCSTRL (Networked Computer Science Technical Report Library) collection. The paper by M. V. N. Prasad, V. R. Lesser, and S. Lander describes their cooperative retrieval and reasoning system of distributed case bases. Finally, the paper by H. Chen, C. Schuffels, and R. Orwig presents their self-organizing approach to Internet categorization and search.