Project Alexandria

The main goal of Project Alexandria is to develop a user-friendly digital library that provides a comprehensive range of library services for collections that include not only digitized maps and images, but wide ranges of other spatially-indexed and graphical information. Users of the Alexandria Digital Library will range from school children to academic researchers to members of the public. These users will be able to retrieve materials from the library by electronic means, and will, for example, be able to search for maps and images on the basis of their information content as well by reference to spatial location. The program of research and development represents a major step towards the evolution of a distributed digital library supporting both textual and spatially-indexed sources of information that will be scaleable to the national level. The long-term goal of the project is to integrate electronic access to such materials with electronic access to both more traditional text materials and other multi-media materials.

Project Alexandria is funded by an interagency grant from NSF, ARPA and NASA of $4,000,000 over a four-year period. The project is directed by Terence R. Smith, Professor of Geography and Computer Science. It involves a consortium of several groups at UCSB, as well as researchers at SUNY (Buffalo) and the University of Maine (Orono). Participating groups at UCSB include the Map and Imagery Laboratory, the Center for Information Processing, the NCGIA, and the Center for Remote Sensing and Environmental Optics. The researchers at SUNY and Maine are members of the NCGIA. In addition to the university libraries at UCSB and SUNY, the project involves other major libraries that include the Library of Congress, the USGS library and the St. Louis Public Library. There are also a number of industrial partners that include DEC, ESRI, XEROX and Conquest. Additional information about the Alexandria Digital Library Project may be obtained from Terence R. Smith (smithtr@cs.ucsb.edu; 805-893-2966) or on the WWW at http://alexandria.sdc.ucsb.edu/.