Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. Proceedings of International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (Preface)

We are happy to present the proceedings of the 15th edition of the TPDL 2011 conference, which is part of an impressive series starting with the first European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL) in Pisa (1997) and subsequently Heraklion (1998), Paris (1999), Lisbon (2000), Darmstadt (2001), Rome (2002), Trondheim (2003), Bath (2004), Vienna (2005), Alicante (2006), Budapest (2007), Aarhus (2008), Corfu (2009) and Glasgow (2010). In the course of these years, ECDL had become one of the major international reference meetings for an ever-growing and more and more multidisciplinary community and thus has considerably broadened in geographical scope: what started as a European event has grown into a part of the increasingly integrated international community building around the notion of digital libraries. From this perspective it was a logical step to rename the conference: Humboldt University in Berlin was thus proud to host the first conference named TPDL, standing for the Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries. The necessity to avoid acronym conflicts with the European Computer Driving Licence thus coincided with the need to see the international scope of the conference reflected in a new name that would avoid the 'regional' limitation to just one continent.