The original Digital Library Initiative (DLI or DLI-1), sponsored by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA, was started in 1994. The original program announcement stated:
“The Initiative’s focus is to dramatically advance the means to collect, store, and make [information] available for searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks – all in user-friendly ways. Digital Libraries basically store materials in electronic format and manipulate large collections of those materials effectively. Research into digital libraries is research into network information systems, concentrating on how to develop the necessary infrastructure to effectively mass-manipulate the information on the Net. The key technical issues are how to search and display desired selections from and across large collections.”
After a competitive proposal solicitation and review process, six large-scale projects ($4M per project on average) were selected. Most projects were more technical in nature and led by reputable computer scientists. Each project consisted of a strong team of computer, information and library science researchers, sociologists, and content specialists (http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/dlione/). The DLI projects were extremely successfully and have helped build an international digital library community.

DLI-2, ITR, IMLS, and NSDL, 1999-

The excitement of Internet-enabled IT developments and e-commerce opportunities in the 1990s prompted the U.S. Government to examine the role of IT research for long-term U.S. interest. A President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) was formed, which included many leading U.S. IT researchers and practitioners. Digital library research was identified as one of the successful federal research programs and a target research area.

The success of the original DLI program and the continued IT research interest as stated in the PITAC report allowed the NSF to continue to spearhead the development of the DLI Phase 2 (DLI-2) research program (http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/). DLI-2 funded 29 research projects, with an additional nine projects with an undergraduate emphasis (http://www.dli2/nsf/gov/projects.html).

An additional 15 projects have been funded since 1999 under the Information Technology Research (ITR) program (http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/itrprojects.html). Some address language (e.g., CMU’s AVENUE project for adaptive voice translation for minority languages) and 3D modeling topics (e.g., Columbia’s project for modeling, visualizing, and analyzing historical and archaeological sites), others research topics in law enforcement information sharing and knowledge management (University of Arizona’s COPLINK agent project) and multilingual access to large spoken archives (Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a $7.5M project, 2001-2006).

In addition to the core DLI-2 and related ITR projects, DLI-2 also sponsors 12 international digital library projects (http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/intl.html) involving partners from the U.K. (e.g., University of Liverpool, Southampton University, King’s College London), Germany (University Library of Gottingen, University of Trier), China (Tsinghua University, National Taiwan University), Japan (National Institute for Informatics), and Africa (West African Research Center). Most international projects face unique logistical and collaboration challenges.
Several U.S. agencies also began to develop digital library projects that are uniquely tailored to their institution’s function. For example, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS, http://www.imls.gov/about/index.htm), which is an independent federal agency that fosters leadership, innovation, and lifetime learning, supports a series of 130+ smaller-scale digital project grants to libraries and museums for research, digitization, and management of digital resources (http://www.imls.gov/closer/cls_po.asp), from the Brooklyn’s Children’s Museum to the Chicago Academy of Sciences, and from Duke University’s library to the Georgia Department of Archives and History.

Another significant digital library research program was developed concurrently under the NSF National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Digital Library Program (NSDL, http://www.nsdl.nsf.gov/indexx.html). The NSDL offers, via the Internet, high-quality materials for science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education. It affects education at all levels, including preK-12, undergraduate, graduate, and life-long learners, by providing anytime, anywhere access to a rich array of authoritative and reliable interactive materials and learning environments. More than 60 projects have been funded since 1998 in three areas: the collection track for offering content (e.g., National Biology Digital Library, Digital Mathematics Library, Experimental Economics Digital Library), the service track for providing technologies and services (e.g., University of Arizona’s GetSmart e-learning concept map system), and the core integration track for linking all contents and services under a unified framework.

B. JCDL, ECDL, AND ICADL: BUILDING AN INTERNATIONAL DIGITAL LIBRARY COMMUNITY

Digital Libraries have become far more important nationally and internationally in 2004 than they were in 1996. Many new and significant national digital library initiatives have emerged. In addition, international conferences in digital library have proliferated from their roots of ACM and IEEE Digital Conferences (and then the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL) to the European version of ECDL (European Conference on Digital Libraries) and the Asian version of ICADL (International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries).