Close to the turn of the first decade of the third millennium, digital libraries are facing critical challenges that lead to major transformations. The expansion of social networking applications is an important development, which has lead to the creation of new user communities and the cohesion of already existing ones.
Although user communities have been under the research lens of the digital library community, they never had higher interest than nowadays. User communities have abandoned pathetic participation in information environments and have developed an active behaviour expressed in a multitude of ways.
In the same time, after a decade of solidification the issue of metadata re-emerges to address the new challenges. Annotations and tagging has been an edge-leading theme for digital libraries, which now can be viewed under a different perspective. The implication of user communities in various aspects of information management stages, such as creation of new information, enrichment of information artifacts, sharing and distribution of information objects, filtering of relevant items and so on, require a thorough examination of the metadata issues and services that augment all these activities.
In this intense environment ECDL 2009, under the general title “Digital Societies”, invites submissions for the proliferation of scientific and research osmosis in the following categories: Papers, Short-Papers, Posters and Demonstrations, Workshops and Tutorials, Panels and Doctoral Consortium. All submissions will be reviewed on the basis of relevance, originality, importance and clarity in a triple peer review process.
