Welcome to this special issue of the International Journal of Digital Libraries (IJDL) to feature the winners and the runners-up in the Vannevar Bush best paper, and the best student paper of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2011 held in Ottawa, Canada, in June 2011. 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.

The invited authors submitted new versions of their papers that expanded upon the description of their work through providing more detail on their approaches and results. In each case, the papers provide more depth on the technical approach, and more detail on their results. The submissions went through the IJDL review process before acceptance to this special issue, and the two winning papers and the two runners-up are featured.

The first invited paper comes from the winner of the overall Vannevar Bush best paper winners at JCDL 2011, SharedCanvas: A Collaborative Model for Digital Facsimiles by authors Sanderson, Albritton, Schwemmer and Van de Sompel. The paper introduces us to the use of OAI-ORE and the emerging new Open Annotations frameworks in providing a system for collaborative annotation of ancient manuscripts through a Canvas metaphor. This work also builds on the notion of Linked Digital Libraries, where the manuscript components that a researcher will be considering can be drawn from more than one Digital Library collection.

The second invited paper comes from the runner-up for overall best paper at JCDL 2011, Interactive Context-aware User-driven Metadata Correction in Digital Libraries by Bainbridge, Twidale and Nichols. The paper reports on proof-of-concept work, looking at the issue of providing support tools to Digital Library users that can help the user overcome some of the well-known constraints in searching, such as the multiple ways names of people are instantiated in different information systems. The paper describes a web browser toolbar add-on solution that utilizes recent advances in browser technology to provide a means to mediate a users search with Digital Library search systems. The work also describes how the solution can be used collaboratively through the tool supporting social connections between users.

The third invited paper comes from the winner of the best student paper at JCDL 2011, Archiving the Web using Page Changes Patterns: A Case Study by Ben Saad and Gançarski. The paper reports on the technique of examining the patterns of changes in web sites to help develop strategies for archiving. The use case on which the work is developed is the archive of French public television channels web sites, sites that are rich in content and also exhibit regular change. The novelty of the work is the development of algorithms to identify patterns of change, and then building strategies to utilize the approach in the archive use case and reporting on the results in the case of the French TV archive.

The fourth invited paper comes from the runner-up for the best student paper at JCDL 2011, Automated Approaches to Characterizing Educational Digital Library Usage: Linking Computational Methods with Qualitative Analyses by Maull, Sumner and Saldivar. In this work, the authors brought the idea of diffusion theory as a methodology to understand the adoption of a system used by teachers across a set of schools to integrate resources from an educational digital library with the curriculum. Similar to the winning student paper, this work developed computational methods for examining the usage data, and then presents an evaluation of the approach through observation and interviews with the teachers.

We would like to thank the authors for accepting the invitations and for their efforts to expand upon the work originally reported in the JCDL papers through adding more detail on their approaches and results.