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ECDL 2002 was the 6th conference in the series of European Conferences on Research and Advanced Technologies for Digital Libraries. Following previous events in Pisa (1997), Heraklion (1998), Paris (1999), Lisbon (2000), and Da- stadt (2001), this year ECDL was held in Rome. ECDL 2002 contributed, - gether with the previous conferences, to establishing ECDL as the major - ropean forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. ECDL 2002 continued the tradition already established by the previous conferences in meeting the needs of a large and diverse constituency, which includes researchers, practitioners, educators, policy makers, and users. The focus of ECDL 2002 was on underlying principles, methods, systems, and tools to build and make available e?ective digital libraries to end users. Architecture, metadata, collection building, web archiving, web technologies,- books, OAI applications, preservation, navigation, query languages, audio video retrieval, multimedia-mixed media, user studies and evaluation, humanities, and digital libraries were some of the key issues addressed. An international Program Committee was set up composed of 61 members, with representatives from 25 countries. A total of 145 paper submissions, 15 poster submissions, and 18 proposals for demos were received. Each paper was evaluated by 3 referees and 42 full papers and 6 short papers of high quality were selected for presentation.

The International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL) is an annual international forum for participants to exchange research results, innovative ideas, and state-of-the-art developments in digital libraries. Built upon the successes of the first four ICADL conferences, the 5th ICADL Conference in Singapore was aimed at further strengthening the position of ICADL as a premier digital library conference that draws high quality papers and presentations from all around the world, while meeting the needs and interests of digital library communities in the Asia-Pacific region. The theme of the conference, “Digital Libraries: People, Knowledge & Technology,” reflects the shared belief of the organizers that success in the development and implementation of digital libraries lies in the achievement of three key areas: the richness and depth of content to meet the needs of the communities they intend to serve; the technologies that are employed to build user-centered environments through organization, interaction, and provision of access to that content; and the human elements of management policies, maintenance, and vision necessary to keep pace with new content, new technologies, and changing user needs.

The Third International Conference on E-commerce and Web Technology (EC-Web 2002) was held in conjunction with the DEXA 02 in Aix-en-Provence, France. This conference, first held in Greenwich, United Kingdom in 2000, is now in its third year and is very well established. As in the two previous years, it served as a forum bringing together researchers from academia and commercial developers from industry to discuss the current state of the art in E-commerce and web technology. Inspirations and new ideas emerged from intensive discussions during formal sessions and social events. Keynote addresses, research presentations, and discussions during the conference helped to further develop the exchange of ideas among the researchers, developers, and practitioners who attended. The conference attracted more than 100 submissions and each paper was reviewed by at least three program committee members. The program committee selected 40 papers for presentation and publication, a task which was not easy due to the high quality of the submitted papers. We would like to express our thanks to our colleagues who helped to put together the technical program: the program committee members and external reviewers for their timely and rigorous reviews of the papers, and the organizing committee for their help in the administrative work and support. We owe special thanks to Gabriela Wagner and Maria Schweikert for always being available when their helping hand was needed.