Digital Libraries and Xerox

Overview and Motivation

Recently, NSF announced awards for digital libraries research as part of a joint initiative of NSF, ARPA, and NASA. The awards were made in response to proposals submitted as a result of a September 1993 call for research on digital libraries.

This initiative has a strong overlap with research and commercial interests at Xerox. In order to capitalize on this initiative, we put together a set of position statements on digital libraries and our related research efforts. That material, gathered in late 1993 and early 1994, is represented by this web of material.

As a result of the initiative, six awards were made. Xerox is officially a participant in research effort with three of the participants projects:

In addition, awards were made to There is a web of information about the joint initiative available as well.

Digital Library related work at Xerox

We at Xerox are searching for ways to enhance the productivity of document intensive activites in the context of group work and within a variety of enterprises. Our method is to bring together our core competence in the areas of new document types, interface research, collaborative systems, information access to build practical systems that can be tested in actual use.

The library represents a social activity in each of our core areas, and exposes a set of document issues that other organizations have only begun to recognize.

The research initiative on Digital Libraries represents a unique opportunity to apply some of the technologies we have developed in conjunction with university partners in a function that will dominate work-practice in the NII-enabled work-force.

This package contains overviews, bibliographies, and a prospectus of digital-library related research that we might engage in at PARC in conjunction with one or more partners in this initiative.

  • User Interface Research
  • The CLASS project
  • Document Image Decoding
  • Information Filtering
  • Replicated Information
  • Document Studies
  • Work Practice Studies
  • Intelligent Information Access
  • Generic Archival Information Access (GAIA)
  • Large-Scale System Dynamics
  • Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval
  • Informational Analysis Tools

  • This page updated 11/23/94 by Larry Masinter, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center