The Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications (IITA) Working Group, the highest level of the country's National Information Infrastructure (NII) technical committee, held an invited workshop in May 1995 to define a research agenda for digital libraries. The shared vision is an entire net of distributed repositories in which objects of any type and any size can be organized and searched within and across different indexed collections. The ultimate goal, as described in the IITA report, is the Grand Challenge of Digital Libraries: "deep semantic interoperability -- the ability of a user to access, consistently and coherently, similar (though autonomously defined and managed) classes of digital objects and services, distributed across heterogeneous repositories, with federating or mediating software compensating for site-by-site variations...Achieving this will require breakthroughs in description as well as retrieval, object interchange and object retrieval protocols. Issues here include the definition and use of metadata and its capture or computation from objects (both textual and multimedia), the use of computed descriptions of objects, federation and integration of heterogeneous repositories with disparate semantics, clustering and automatic hierarchical organization of information, and algorithms for automatic rating, ranking, and evaluation of information quality, genre, and other properties." "The use of computed descriptions of (multimedia) objects" and "clustering and automatic hierarchical organization of information" present pressing scientific and engineering problems that have a significant potential impact on the US society in this era of the Internet and distributed, multimedia computing.

The Illinois DLI Project, one of six projects funded by the NSF/DARPA/NASA DLI, consists of two major components: (1) a production testbed based in a real library (SGML publisher stream deployed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UIUC) and (2) fundamental technology research for semantic interoperability (semantic indexes across subjects and media developed at the University of Arizona). The Illinois DLI production testbed was developed in the Grainger Engineering library at UIUC. It supports full SGML federated structure search on an experimental Web-based interface. The initial rollout was available at the UIUC campus in October 1997 and has been integrated with the library information services. The testbed consist of materials from 5 publishers, 55 engineering journals, and 40,000 full-text articles. The testbed was implemented using SoftQuad (SGML rendering) and OpenText (full-text search), both commercial software.