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Over the last decade numerous digital libraries have been designed and developed world wide. One can evaluate the importance of these projects in terms of their resources, collections, services access, and other related aspects. However, the ultimate measure of success of digital libraries is their acceptance and use in the work and every day life of their users.

The goal of the first part of LIDA 2007 is to explore the behavior, place, and role of users of digital libraries and the reasons, ways, and means related to their use of digital libraries. Special attention will be on users’ information behavior and moreover, on the role of users throughout the process of design, development, and evaluation of digital libraries. The general aim is to concentrate on works that increase our understanding of the needs, interests, and experiences of users in the context of digital libraries. Many research approaches and understanding users could be examined, e.g., behavioral, cognitive, affective, organizational, social.

Invited are contributions (types described below) covering the following topics:

• reasons for and approaches to use of digital libraries; related experiences of various categories of users. Why and how do users interact with digital libraries?
• users’ experience with digital library content in various forms of presentation (text, audio, visual) and accessibility (mobile, handheld, wireless, wearable, etc.)
• usability evaluation of digital libraries; methodologies for and results of usability studies
• impact of digital libraries on various categories of user populations and in various contexts (within specific cultures, countries, disciplines, professions, age groups; with various technology use levels, access problems, etc.)
• cross-cultural and international studies of the opportunities and barriers to development and use of digital libraries
• use of various digital library services, such as virtual and chat reference
• users as interactive creators of a new generation of digital libraries
• application of various theories and models in study of users and use of digital libraries and associated human information behavior
• relating such theories and user information needs assessments to design and development of digital libraries.

Part II. Economics and digital libraries.

The goal of the second part of LIDA 2007 is to address economic factors: costs, resources, sharing, consortia, and the nature and control of expenditures. Digital libraries, like all other libraries, have costs that must be paid. In addition to the familiar costs of providing services, digital libraries assume a responsibility to serve as portals, for their complex communities of users and to the exponentially expanding resources of the World Wide Web. Finally, the costs of conversion from older forms such as paper and microfiche, to new digital forms, are of vital importance because, increasingly, materials that have not been converted will not be used.

There are several approaches to library economics, including most importantly so-called unit cost, or functional cost analysis, and econometric modeling. As most libraries are today a mix of paper and digital, it is particularly difficult to separate costs into the costs of becoming digital, and the ongoing costs of remaining digital. As libraries reference each others’ materials, the collaborations dreamed of in the 1970’s and 1980’s become a practical reality. But the forms of operational collaboration needed to make all of this both efficient and effective are still being discovered. At the same time, some dramatic commercial initiatives are putting vast amounts of material into digital searchable form.

The general aim is to bring together working librarians, academic researchers, industry representatives and government officials, to review our present understanding of library economics in the Digital Age, to identify needed research, and to sketch a road map for the transition.

Invited are contributions (types described below) covering the following topics:

• application of library performance measures to the digital realm, to new forms of service, and to new methods of delivery
• methods for measuring or estimating the costs of digital operations in a scalable and generalizable fashion
• real world experience of moving from a non-digital situation to a fully digital one, with regard to some area of service, with particular focus on the costs, both tangible and intangible, of the transition. This can be from the perspective of a library, a publisher, or an Internet firm
• case studies of governmental intervention to accelerate the digitization of national resources, or of more specialized collections
• other issues related to the economics of digital libraries - novel approaches, are particularly welcome.