Message from the Conference Chair

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to Taipei for the 2002 International Conference on Digital Archive Technologies (ICDAT2002). This is the first international conference organized by the National Science and Technology Program for Digital Archives, which was officially launched in January 2002.

The goals of NDAP are to preserve national cultural heritage and collections, promote knowledge and information sharing, enhance education and life-long learning, bootstrap cultural content and value-added industries, improve literacy, creativity and quality of life, and finally join international collaborative efforts toward preserving and sustaining cultural civilization of the mankind.

Digital archives are widely recognized as a crucial component of a global information infrastructure for the new century. Research and development projects in many parts of the world are concerned about using advanced information technologies for managing and manipulating digital information, ranging from data storage, preservation, indexing, searching, presentation, and dissemination capabilities to organizing and sharing of digital resources over networks. In addition to digital content experts, information technology specialists are essential for a successful development of advanced digital archives. The main purpose of this two-day conference is to bring together international experts, researchers and developers to exchange ideas and present their experiences in the utilization of advanced technologies for and the approaches to the development of digital archives.

This two-day conference will include four invited speeches, nine technical presentations, and one panel discussion on the prospects of digital libraries and future international collaboration.

I would like to thank our invited speakers, especially those from abroad. David Dawson of Resource: the Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, Judith Graves of Library of Congress, William Mischo of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and William E. Underwood of Georgia Tech Research Institute. The technical presentations will cover topics related to the digital libraries and digital archives technologies including database, multimedia processing, information retrieval and knowledge management.

This conference is arranged in conjunction with the 2002 APEC Workshop on e-Learning and Digital Archives to promote interchanges between the technology development and information services and content communities. I hope you will find ICDAT2002 an exciting and informative forum to share experiences and results.

Der-Tsai Lee

December 19, 2002