Two years have passed since our previous symposium, ISDL '95. In ISDL '95, we could see several projects that had just been launched. These included, the Digital Library Initiative by NSF/ARPA/NASA; the large-scale digitization program by the French National Library; and Kansai-kan,the new library for the future by the National Diet Library in Japan. In these two years, we have seen much progress in the research and development of the digital library. We have found key words and phrases to express the important aspects in the digital library, e.g., information discovery, interoperability, metadata, optimized search and retrieval, intellectual property, economy model, user study, multilinguality, and international collaboration.
The present symposium program includes a number of invited papers by distinguished authors from Asia, Australia, Europe, the United States, and Japan. The program committee received a number of papers submitted from five continents. The contributed papers have been reviewed by at least three reviewers and selected based on their quality. I believe that ISDL '97 will be able to offer an international forum to discuss the digital library based on our experience in these years.
Finally, I would like to express my sincere thanks to all of the authors for their excellent work and also to all of the committee members for their excellent contribution to this symposium. I would like to express my thanks to Professor Jun Adachi of NACSIS, Mr. Koichi Takeda of IBM Japan, Mr. Tetsuro Shinsu of Nisho Iwai Infocom Systems, and all of the others who encouraged me to organize ISDL '97 from the early stage of the planning. And last, but not least, I would like to thank my family, Makiko, Yuri and Tomoki.