We are delighted to present the ECDL 2004 Conference proceedings from the 8th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital - braries at the University of Bath, Bath, UK. This followed an impressive and geographicallydispersedseriesof locationsfor previousevents: Pisa(1997),H- aklion(1998),Paris(1999),Lisbon (2000),Darmstadt(2001),Rome (2002),and Trondheim (2003). The conference re?ected the rapidly evolving landscape of digital libraries, both in technology developments and in the focus of approaches to implem- tation. An emphasis on the requirements of the individual user and of diverse and distributed user communities was apparent. In addition, the conference p- gramme began to address, possibly for the ?rst time, the associated themes of e-research/e-scienceand e-learning and their relationship to digital libraries. We observed increasing commonality in both the distributed information archit- tures and the technical standards that underpin global infrastructure devel- ments. Digital libraries are integral to this information landscape and to the creation of increasingly powerful tools and applications for resource discovery and knowledge extraction. Digital libraries support and facilitate the data and information ?ows within the scholarly knowledge cycle and provide essential - abling functionality for both learnersand researchers. The varied and innovative research activities presented at ECDL 2004 demonstrate the exciting potential of this very fast-moving ?eld. The 148 papers, 43 posters, 5 panels, 14 tutorials and 4 workshops subm- ted this year were once again of the highest quality.

Digital Library Architectures.- Dynamic Digital Library Construction and Configuration.- Milos: A Multimedia Content Management System for Digital Library Applications.- Designing an Integrated Digital Library Framework to Support Multiple Heterogeneous Collections.- DSpace: A Year in the Life of an Open Source Digital Repository System.- Evaluation and Usability.- Spatial Ranking Methods for Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) in Digital Libraries.- Evaluation of an Information System in an Information Seeking Process.- Fiction Electronic Books: A Usability Study.- Interoperable Digital Library Programmes? We Must Have QA!.- User Interfaces and Presentation.- Next Generation Search Interfaces - Interactive Data Exploration and Hypothesis Formulation.- Ontology Based Interfaces to Access a Library of Virtual Hyperbooks.- Document Icons and Page Thumbnails: Issues in Construction of Document Thumbnails for Page-Image Digital Libraries.- Citiviz: A Visual User Interface to the CITIDEL System.- New Approaches to Information Retrieval.- System Support for Name Authority Control Problem in Digital Libraries: OpenDBLP Approach.- NLP Versus IR Approaches to Fuzzy Name Searching in Digital Libraries.- From Abstract to Virtual Entities: Implementation of Work-Based Searching in a Multimedia Digital Library.- Approaching the Problem of Multi-lingual Information Retrieval and Visualization in Greek and Latin and Old Norse Texts.- Interoperability.- Building Interoperability for United Kingdom Historic Environment Information Resources.- Prototyping Digital Libraries Handling Heterogeneous Data Sources - The ETANA-DL Case Study.- zetoc SOAP: A Web Services Interface for a Digital Library Resource.- Enhanced Indexing and Searching Methods.- A Comparison of Text and Shape Matching for Retrieval of Online 3D Models.- Corpus-Based Query Expansion in Online Public Access Catalogs.- Automated Indexing with Restricted Random Walks on Large Document Sets.- Personalisation and Annotation.- Annotations in Digital Libraries and Collaboratories - Facets, Models and Usage.- P-News: Deeply Personalized News Dissemination for MPEG-7 Based Digital Libraries.- Laws of Attraction: In Search of Document Value-ness for Recommendation.- Music Digital Libraries.- Sound Footings: Building a National Digital Library of Australian Music.- Content-Based Retrieval in Digital Music Libraries.- Knowledge-Based Scribe Recognition in Historical Music Archives.- Personal Digital Libraries.- Enhancing Kepler Usability and Performance.- Media Matrix: Creating Secondary Repositories.- Incorporating Physical and Digital Artifacts into Growing Personal Collections.- Innovative Technologies for Digital Libraries.- Enhancing the OpenDLib Search Service.- Multi-level Exploration of Citation Graphs.- Collaborative Querying for Enhanced Information Retrieval.- Open Archives Initiative.- Servicing the Federation: The Case for Metadata Harvesting.- Developing a Technical Registry of OAI Data Providers.- Applying SOAP to OAI-PMH.- New Models and Tools.- Connexions: An Alternative Approach to Publishing.- teiPublisher>: Bridging the Gap Between a Simple Set of Structured Documents and a Functional Digital Library.- Managing a Paradigm Shift - Aligning Management, Privacy Policy, Technology and Standards.- User-Centred Design.- Towards an Integrated Digital Library: Exploration of User Responses to a 'Joined-Up' Service.- Supporting Information Structuring in a Digital Library.- Evaluating Strategic Support for Information Access in the DAFFODIL System.- Innovative Technologies for Digital Libraries.- Using Digital Library Techniques - Registration of Scientific Primary Data.- Towards Topic Driven Access to Full Text Documents.- Bibliographic Component Extraction Using Support Vector Machines and Hidden Markov Models.- Towards a Policy Language for Humans and Computers.