JCDL

Welcome and Bienvenue to JCDL 2011! We are delighted to welcome you to Canada's capital, Ottawa, for the 11th annual international ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). JCDL is a major international forum that focuses on digital libraries and associated educational, technical and social issues. The conference theme this year is "Digital Libraries: Bringing Together Scholars, Scholarship and Research Data", and the program reflects the theme as well as the broader context of 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 is hosted by the University of Ottawa on their campus next to the historic Rideau Canal and just 10 minutes walk from the Parliament buildings, the National Gallery, the Royal Canadian Mint, the National War Memorial and the Byward Market. Slightly further you will find the Governor General's Residence (Rideau Hall), the Museum of Nature, the War Museum, the Aviation and Space Museum, the Science and Tech Museum, and the Deifenbunker. Just across the Ottawa River, the city of Gatineau in Quebec hosts the Museum of Civilization, the Casino du Lac-Leamy, many excellent restaurants and act as the gateway to the Gatineau Park. Just a 15 minute drive from Ottawa, the park offers 125 kilometres of hiking trails, 50 glacial lakes and 356 square kilometres of Canadian Shield inhabited by white tailed deer, coyotes, black bear, timber wolves and beaver.

On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we would like to thank the local organizing committee, students and volunteers who supported the conference in its various stages. A special mention has to be made regarding the local support of Patrick Labelle and Cynthia Bail, on whom much of the local organization rested.

Each day of the main conference will begin with a keynote. The opening keynote will be given by Daniel J. Caron, the Librarian and Archivist of Canada. Our second speaker is Joan Morris DiMicco from the Visual Communication Lab of IBM Research and our closing keynote will be given by Christopher Barnes, the current Director of the NEPTUNE project, a major Canadian ocean sciences initiative.

This year, we received 243 submissions that went through rigorous review resulting in a program that reflects the high quality of research being conducted on digital libraries in many disciplines. From 99 full papers and 78 short papers, the Program Committee selected 28 full papers and 29 short papers for presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings. In addition, 32 posters and 15 demonstrations will be presented, and abstracts for these also appear in the proceedings. Demonstrations will be viewable during the lunch period on the first day of the main conference. Posters, and accompanying minute madness, will be viewable during the poster reception. The Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award, and the Best Student Paper Award will be presented at the conference banquet.

JCDL 2011 continues the tradition of supporting digital library developers with 6 tutorials that cover a range of timely issues including user studies, preservation planning, and topics on teaching about digital libraries. The program also includes 6 workshops, which provide a venue for a cross-section of disciplines to explore focused, cutting-edge topics including disciplinary repositories, web archives and preservation, and visualization.