Welcome to Digital Libraries '95.
My association with these first two International Conferences on Digital Libraries has been a rewarding and interesting experience. As conference chair for DL'94 and program chair for DL'95, I have been struck by how quickly events are taking place in this area. Projects are moving rapidly from proposal to prototype. The quality and quantity of papers submitted to this year's conference shows this dramatically.
The papers that appear in these proceedings were evaluated by a committee of external referees, whose names appear elsewhere in these proceedings. We are thankful to those members of the community who volunteered their time to serve as our program committee. The program committee's reviews and recommendations were collected and were discussed in depth at a full-day program meeting attended by the six associate paper chairs. In some cases the associate paper chairs decided that it was necessary to reread carefully the paper before making a decision on whether to include it in the program. Each paper printed in these pages received intensive scrutiny at two levels before being accepted for inclusion.
With these first two conferences we have tried to enable the multidisciplinary, international community of scholars that is required for effective work in digital libraries. We hope that the reader will feel that we have succeeded. We are pleased that the ACM will initiate their series of conferences on Digital Libraries in 1996, continuing the threads initiated in DL'94 and DL'95. Rather than being a continuation of our conferences, however, the ACM conferences represent an expansion. We hope that they will also serve to unify the community of researchers and practitioners by providing the single focal point that will be the natural dissemination point for results in this exciting area.
Richard Furuta
Program Chair