The Alexandria Digital Library Project is a consortium of researchers, developers, and educators, drawn from the academic, public and private sectors. It is based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and involves personnel from the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Arizona.
The mission of the Alexandria Project is to:
• conduct research on issues critical to the construction of distributed digital libraries of geospatial, multimedia materials;
• develop technologies necessary to support such a library;
• design, construct and evaluate testbed systems based on the research and development results; and
• resolve the organizational and technological issues underlying the transition from a testbed system to an operational digital library.
The home page is a cleanly designed image map that provides ready access to the principal subsections of the Web site described below.
The subsection on “organization” lists the personnel on each of the “information systems” teams, such as the:
• Performance and parallel processing team.
• Image‐processing team.
• Geospatial information research team.
• User interface design and implementation team.
For each of the teams, there are also links to listings of abstracts for project‐related technical publications.
The “Publications” subsection provides citations for research papers and links to project newsletters and various project reports and documents. Unfortunately, only a modest percentage of the research papers are available online. Also, some of the project reports are password‐protected.
There are eight corporate, six government, and four academic partners involved in this work. The corporate partners include Digital Equipment Corporation, Microsoft and Oracle, while the government partners include the US Navy, US Geological Survey, and the Library of Congress. The “Partners” subsection gives an overview of all the co‐operative work being done with all of these groups.
The Alexandria Project is one of six digital library projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. There are links off the home page to those sites (e.g. Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan, etc.).
Finally, from the home page, there is a link to “Other spatial data on the Web”, where a wide array of Internet‐based resources are accessible by subject or title. Examples would be aerial photographs, climate data, and satellite images. Sites offering extraterrestrial data (concerning the planets, astronomical objects, etc.) are also listed.
This Web site is well‐designed and easy to navigate. It contains a great deal of up‐to‐date information about the Alexandria Digital Library Project. It will be of particular value to researchers in the field and librarians interested in the development of network‐based access to geospatial data. The links to data elsewhere on the Internet are also helpful.
