Proceedings of the 2008 ACM workshop on Research advances in large digital book repositories

It is our pleasure to welcome you to the BooksOnline'08 Workshop on Research Advances in Large Digital Book Repositories. The objective of the workshop is to provide an opportunity for participants to exchange their views and share their experiences with research, applications, and services that involve digital book collections. Through discussions and brainstorming we expect to identify exciting new opportunities for innovation as well as issues that require immediate attention and should be part of our research agenda over the following five years. We are delighted that the workshop involves experts from academia, libraries, publishing industry, and online services, who will provide their perspective on the state-of-the-art, outstanding problems, and opportunities for innovation. In the proceedings we include selected position papers that span topics from unique characteristics of on-line book collections and new usage scenarios to requirements for innovative approaches to content representation and discovery. They point to the importance of social aspects of online collections and a need to assess quality of services through large scale experimentation.