Management Development Institute (MDI) in association with Indian Association of Special Libraries and Information Centres (IASLIC) and INDEST-AICTE Consortium, Ministry of HRD, Government of India had successfully organized the International Conference on Digital Libraries and Knowledge Organization (ICDK 2011) during 14 to 16 February 2011 at MDI Gurgaon. International organizations such as UNESCO, South Asian Studies Council of Yale University and Goethe-Institute (Max Mueller Bhavan) were also partners in organising this conference. The conference has brought together over 300 delegates from all parts of the world. Around 50 participants from outside India.
The galaxy of international experts and academicians from the domain of digital information systems and knowledge organization processes who attended the conference as speakers, pre-conference workshop resources persons include names like Prof. Gary Marchionini, Dean & Cary C. Boshamer Professor, School of Information & Library Science, North Carolina University; Prof. Fausto Giunchiglia, Department of Computer Science, University of Trento, Italy; Prof. Mitsuhiro ODA, Department of Education, Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan; Prof. ARD Prasad, Indian Statistical Institute Bangalore and Prof. John Rose of University of Waikato, New Zealand among others.
The conference was inaugurated by Prof Surendra Prasad, Director, Indian Institute of Technology at a function organized at Epicentre Auditorium, Apparel House, Gurgaon on Monday, 14th February 2011. Prof. V.K. Gupta, Director MDI welcomed the delegates. The conference had six pre-conference tutorials on cutting-edge digital library topics by international experts. There were 24 invited talks and over 90 research papers were presented during the conference. The main themes of the conference were: (1) Case studies of digital libraries and institutional repositories (2) Digital preservation strategies (3) Semantic web applications (4) Digital library support for e-learning (5) Knowledge management (6) Web 2.0/3.0 and social media application in information services (7) Knowledge representation models (8) Open access initiatives (9) Web retrieval tools and techniques among others.
The valedictory function was organized on Wednesday, 16th February 2011 at MDI campus. Prof. Mushirul Hasan, Director General of the National Archives of India delivered the valedictory address. Dr. Jagdish Arora, Director, INFLIBNET welcomed the delegates. Prof. V.K. Gupta, Director, MDI presided over the function.
Dr. Antony Jose of MDI was the Conference Chair of this three-day international conference.
As an outcome of the conference, two international journals (International Journal of Computer Applications and Emerald’s journal Program: Electronic Library & Information Systems) will bring out special issues with selected papers from the conference. Apart from that, Edited book(s) with reputed international publishers are also planned covering selective papers from the conference.
