Digital Library Federation

DLF's mission is to enable new research and scholarship of its members, students, scholars, lifelong learners, and the general public by developing an international network of digital libraries.

In September 1995, CPA received a nine-month planning grant from IBM for $100,000 on behalf of DLF to support the preparation of a technological and policy proposal with specific guidelines for creating and maintaining a national digital library.

Over the next nine months, DLF convened a Planning Task Force to establish working groups to consider the key technical, financial, and organizational issues to forming a national digital library, resulting in three areas of focus in which DLF could play a role in building a digital library infrastructure: discovery and retrieval, rights and economic models, and archiving.

For example, an early initiative led by one member of the committee, Bernie Hurley, was the articulation of an SGML DTD for encoding information about digital objects.

As meeting places they provide an opportunity for the DLF Board, advisory groups, initiatives to conduct their business and to present their work to the broader membership.