The Doctoral Consortium is a workshop for Ph.D. students from all over the world who are in the early phases of their dissertation work. Ideally, students should have written or be close to completing a thesis proposal, and be far enough away from finishing the thesis that they can make good use of the feedback from the consortium.

The goal of the Doctoral Consortium is to help students with their thesis and research plans by providing feedback and general advice in a constructive and international atmosphere. A panel of prominent professors and experienced practitioners in the field of digital library research in organizations from different countries and continents will conduct the workshop. They will review all the submissions and comment on the content of the thesis as well as on the presentation.

The workshop will take for the full day of  June 10, 2012, the same day as the tutorials. The format of the workshop will be as follows: students will have 20 minutes to present their research, focusing on the main theme of their thesis, what they have achieved so far and how they plan to continue their work. Another 10 to 20 minutes is reserved for discussion and feedback from both the professors and other participants. Small group sessions will be held in the afternoon to facilitate more in depth discussions.

There is no registration fee for doctoral students who are accepted for the Doctoral Consortium.

Call for Papers and Topics

Students interested in participating in the Doctoral Consortium should submit an extended abstract describing their Digital Library research. Submissions relating to any aspect of Digital Library research, development, and evaluation are welcomed, including:

• technical advances
• usage and impact studies
• policy analyses
• social and institutional implications
• theoretical contributions
• interaction and design advances
• innovative applications in the sciences, humanities, and education.

To apply for participation at the Doctoral Consortium, please provide an extended abstract of your doctoral work in the ACM Conference style (for LaTeX, use the "Option 2" style) and upload it via the EasyChair link ( provided below). The extended abstract is restricted to 4000 words.  Submissions should be submitted electronically in pdf format. The abstracts should:

• Be solely authored by the student and based on his or her dissertation research,
• Clearly formulate the research question,
• Identify the significant problems in the field of research,
• Summarize the current knowledge of the problem domain, as well as the state of the art for solutions,
• Clearly present any preliminary research plans and ideas, and the results achieved so far,
• Sketch the research methodology that is to be applied,
• Describe the expected contributions of the applicant to the research area, and
• (For technical research) describes how the research is innovative, novel or extends existing approaches to a problem.

The following should be appended to your abstract:

• A detailed statement by the student saying why he or she wants to attend the Consortium, an
• A statement by his or her advisor / supervisor saying how the student would benefit by attending the Consortium.

Submissions will be judged on originality, significance, correctness, and clarity. Only students in the early stages of their Ph.D programs will be considered.  Workshop participation is limited to 16 Ph.D. students. 

Accepted abstracts will be distributed to Doctoral Consortium participants in separate workshop proceedings, but will not be published in the JCDL Proceedings.  Participants will be invited to publish a revised version of their extended abstracts in a special issue of the TCDL Bulletin, the publication of the IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Digital Libraries.

The submission deadline is 14th April 2012 at midnight Hawaiian Time.
Doctoral Consortium Abstracts are to be submitted via EasyChair at: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=jcdl2012.

Doctoral Consortium co-chairs:

• Luanne Freund, University of British Columbia, Canada
• Mounia Lalmas, Yahoo! Research, Spain

Important Dates