The Editors in Chief of IJDL extended an invitation to the winners and runners-up to submit extended versions of their JCDL 2011 papers.This special issue contains those papers.The ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries is a major international annual forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, organizational, and social issues.The 2011 conference theme was "Digital Libraries: Bringing Together Scholars, Scholarship and Research Data", in recognition of the changes the digital age is now bringing to scholarship.The conference featured 28 full and 29 short technical papers that had gone through a rigorous peer review along with posters, tutorials, demonstrations and workshops.The JCDL program committee nominates papers they consider highlight work of significance in the field, and those are then reviewed again by an awards sub-committee.

Concept browsing interfaces can help educators and learners to locate and use learning resources that are aligned with recognized learning goals. The Strand Map Service enables users to navigate interactive visualizations of related learning goals and to request digital library resources aligned with learning goals. These interfaces are created using a programmatic Web service interface that dynamically generates interactive visual components. Preliminary findings suggest that these library interfaces appear to help users stay focused on the scientific content of their information discovery task, as opposed to focusing on the mechanics of searching.

eScience has emerged as an important framework for dramatically rethinking the conduct of scientific research using information technology. There is an unparalleled opportunity for the international eScience and digital library communities to create shared infrastructure to support the conduct of science from end-to-end; i.e., from hypothesis generation, to collecting and analyzing scientific data, to the reporting of research outcomes, and the inclusion of scientific data and models in teaching and learning processes. For this vision to be realized, the two communities must establish a shared vision and research agenda encompassing several critical dimensions, including differences in theoretical and methodological approaches, and collaboration goals. Additionally, for the benefits of eScience and digital libraries to be fully realized, it is vital to establish a shared vision of the broader impact of this work for educators, learners, and the general public.

OCLC's CORC service consists of two Web-based utilities: the CORC Resource Catalog (RC) and the Pathfinder utility. The RC consists of a generator for creating MARC or Dublin Core bibliographic records for Internet resources as well as a database of such records. The Pathfinder utility features a database of research guides in a Web format and offers a straightforward method to create original research guides. Both elements of the CORC service are well wrought and should be of interest to libraries.

The community digital library has emerged as a recent evolution in the development of digital libraries. A community digital library is distinct through having a community of potential users define and guide the development of the library. In this article, we present how the geoscience community has worked to develop The Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) in the light of recent work in the area of meta-design, the design of the design process. The development of DLESE is described utilizing a conceptual framework developed from the analysis of a variety of open source projects.

Review of digital educational resources, such as course modules, simulations, and data analysis tools, can differ from review of scholarly articles, in the heterogeneity and complexity of the resources themselves. The Partnership Review Model, as demonstrated in two cases, appears to promote cooperative interactions between distributed resource reviewers, enabling reviewers to effectively divide up the task of reviewing complex resources with little explicit coordination. The shared structural outline of the resource made visible in the review environment enables participants to monitor other reviewers' actions and to thus target their efforts accordingly. This reviewing approach may be effective in educational digital libraries that depend on community volunteers for most of their reviewing.

We are looking at how new forms of document interface can be used to support new forms of scholarly discourse, and ultimately, new models of scholarly publishing. Towards this end, we have been using specially designed computer-meditated conferencing technology to realize an innovative peer review model within an academic e-journal ‐ The Journal of Interactive Media in Education. In essence, through re-design of social processes and technical products, we have tried to shift reviewing from a closed process centered on evaluating scholarly work to an open process promoting constructive dialogue between participants. Our experiences indicate that ongoing and explicit mediation activities by editors play an important role in helping review participants (authors, reviewers, guest editors) effectively learn about and participate in the new process. We describe our specific mediation activities and the theoretical framework they are derived from: meta-structuring. The utility of the meta-structuring theory is derived from its explicit acknowledgement that (1) technology adaptation and cultural change are gradual processes that occur primarily after deployment and during use and (2) ongoing proactive interventions (mediations) can facilitate these gradual processes and improve technology use and acceptance. We argue that ‘meta-structuring’ is an instance of a broader class of theories, which we call “developmental theories-in-action”, which offer a promising direction for future research agendas.

The Internet and WWW offer the technical means to enable wider user partici- pation in the software design process. One rapidly emerging approach is to use light- weight assemblages of common communication technologies, such as email, list servs, discussion forums, and shared web pages, to support distributed participatory design. However, achieving significant and ongoing participation by users in software design requires more than just communication tools. It also requires careful consideration of the representations that will be used to mediate discussions, the roles and responsibilities of the participants, and the overall design and structure of the design process itself. While these are traditional concerns in participatory design, the way these concerns manifest themselves in distributed technology-mediated environments is quite different than in face-to-face settings. We use results from a case study, the Unidata MetApps Discussion Area, to discuss three critical issues that can arise in distributed settings: (1) difficulties with inclusive participation, (2) a bias towards conservative design, and (3) a p erceived lack of process reliability.