Introduction

        The Asian Digital Libraries Conference (ADL) tries to bring together researchers and developers from academia, industry and government to advance the research of digital libraries in Asia. The first ADL was held in Hong Kong in August, 1998. The second conference will be held on November 8-9, 1999 at the newly inaugurated University Library of the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. The conference will be immediately followed by IRAL’99 (Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Languages, 1999), to further facilitate interchange between the DL and IR communities.