We've spent the last two years on the National Digital Library Program for the Library of Congress, developing advanced prototypes for American Memory. Bits and pieces have found their way in their implementations, and we've delivered a set of specifications to the Library, which show them ways to browse libraries of photographs and provide visual overviews. WebTOC is available as a free download. It goes out to anybody's site and produces a hierarchy created out of the web site, which provides a visualization of the amount of the stuff that's there and where differently formatted materials are. So if you're looking for videos, for example, you will see where they are in a very large web site instantly.
Visualization is a hot direction right now.
One of the things we've seen at Maryland is a new spin-off company based on our visualization work. A former student Chris Ahlberg has formed a company, Spotfire , which provides generic information visualization tools that can be used for digital library applications. It's troubling to me that many people do not distinguish between people and machines. Of course, the communities are ever-changing. I think they should shift the emphasis by retitling it to the Digital Library Communities Initiative.