5th National Russian Research Conference "Digital Libraries: Advanced Methods and Technologies, Digital Collections"

On the 29th-31st of October 2003, the fifth National Russian Research Conference "Digital Libraries: Advanced Methods and Technologies, Digital Collections" was held at the Saint-Petersburg State University. Specialists from different scientific disciplines contributing to digital library field participated in the conference. In papers and discussions following topics were touched upon: information integration, access to distributed and heterogeneous digital collections; methods and tools for data discovery, extraction analysis and retrieval in digital libraries; use of digital libraries in education; models and standards for information and metainformation representation (including thesauri and ontologies) in digital libraries; the role of digital collections in traditional libraries, museums, archives, information centers; virtual scientific collections; methodologies; advanced technologies of digital collection building, storage and system maintenance; digital library architectures; and others.

On the 30th of October, the project "Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative" (CDLI) was presented at the session devoted to museum collections in a joint paper by the curator of the cuneiform collection of the State Hermitage Museum N. Koslova and the professor of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) P. Damerow. This project unites the efforts of assyriologists, historians of the ancient past, experts in the history of science, and museum curators from various countries, to create a systematized database available for scientific research via the Internet. The database will include digital images and interpretations of the earliest written documents in human history. The CDLI was founded by the University of California, Los Angeles and the Max-Planck Insitute for the History of Science in Berlin. You can get more information about the project, its aims and results, and the participation of the State Hermitage on the Hermitage site, see "Virtual Exhibitions: Mesopotamian Written Records in the Hermitage"
(http://hermitagemuseum.org/html_En/12/2003/hm12_1_16_2.html), as well as on the CDLI site (http://cdli.ucla.edu).

In the paper presented by N. Koslova and P. Damerow, after a brief description of the objects of digitization, i.e. the earliest cuneiform texts, the results of the cooperative work were discussed: creating an electronic catalog of the cuneiform texts, digitization of more than 2000 cuneiform tablets from the Hermitage collection, the definition of a document type description for cuneiform text transliterations.

On the whole, the conference on digital libraries was a great success. An open exchange of experience and results is extremely important for further research.