Co-authorship networks in the digital library research community

The field of digital libraries (DLs) coalesced in 1994: the first digital library conferences were held that year, awareness of the World Wide Web was accelerating, and the National Science Foundation awarded $24 Million (US) for the Digital Library Initiative (DLI). In this paper we examine the state of the DL domain after a decade of activity by applying social network analysis to the co-authorship network of the past ACM, IEEE, and joint ACM/IEEE digital library conferences. We base our analysis on a common binary undirectional network model to represent the co-authorship network, and from it we extract several established network measures. We also introduce a weighted directional network model to represent the co-authorship network, for which we define AuthorRank as an indicator of the impact of an individual author in the network. The results are validated against conference program committee members in the same period. The results show clear advantages of PageRank and AuthorRank over degree, closeness and betweenness centrality metrics. We also investigate the amount and nature of international participation in Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL).     

From a System of Journals to a Web of Objects

Herbert Van de Sompel, Prototyping Team Leader, Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, took the audience on a journey from a paper-based scholarly communication system to a web of objects. Increasingly, the research process, not just its output, is web-based. Objects created and used as part of that process do not have the same sense of fixity that traditional publications had. Van de Sompel explored the problems inherent in the transition and the consequences of failing to proactively archive the full context of the scholarly record on the web.