Proceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries

Welcome to JCDL 2009! We are delighted to welcome you back to Texas for the 9 th annual international Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. Since its initiation in 2001, JCDL has continued to be the major international forum for research, practice, and social issues in Digital Libraries. We trust that you will find that this year's conference maintains previous conferences' commitment to excellence and reflection of the area's multi-faceted interests. This year's conference will be held in the new AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center. The center is unique in Austin as it is designed as a high technology residential executive-learning environment, as well as a comfortable, luxurious hotel accommodation. Situated conveniently at the gateway to The University of Texas at Austin, the center offers inspiring views of the university's Tower and the State Capitol, or a serene central courtyard. Convening and sleeping in the shadows of these two great symbols, conferees can feel the extension of promise and power in the university's slogan, "What starts here, changes the world." We are excited by the two excellent speakers who have agreed to provide keynote talks at this year's conference. Christine Borgman, Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, will speak on "Digital Libraries: Now Here or Nowhere?" She will be introduced by Edward Fox. Gerhard Fischer, Professor of Computer Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, and the Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado at Boulder will speak on "Cultures of Participation: Opportunities and Challenges for the Future of Digital Libraries." He will be introduced by Tamara Sumner. The program committee worked hard to build a program that reflects JCDL's reputation for high quality. Each paper (both full and short) was reviewed in advance of a day and a half long in-person paper selection meeting. The program contains 29 full papers selected from the 102 submitted (a selection rate of 28%) and 13 short papers selected from the 43 submitted. Additionally, 5 papers originally submitted in the full format were converted to the short format by the program committee, for a total of 18 short papers to be presented at the conference. The papers are augmented by a robust collection of posters and demonstrations whose abstracts may be found in these proceedings. One of the demonstration activities this year is especially interesting - a virtual JCDL poster exhibition will be available in Second Life! Program committee members also were asked to nominate full papers for consideration for awards from the conference. Nine papers were identified and were reevaluated once the final versions had been submitted. You can find the nominated papers in paper sessions 5, 6, and 8. From the finalists, contained in session 8, two awards will be announced at the conference -- the Vannevar Bush Best Paper award and the award for the Best Student Paper. You can find the names of the awardees on the JCDL Web site (http://www.jcdl.org/) after the conference. We would like to thank the selection committee for the awards: Geneva Henry, Christine Borgman, Gary Marchionini, and Andreas Paepcke. The conference's program also contains two panels: "What should we preserve from a born-digital world?" with Bob Allen, Anne Gilliland, Michael Lesk, Catherine Marshall, and Megan Winget, and "Google as Library Redux," with panelists Michael Lesk, Clifford Lynch, and Gretchen Hoffman.