Background - Global Memory Net is funded by the National Science Foundation's International Digital Library Program under grant number NSF/IIS-9905833 (2000-2005, PI: Ching-chih Chen, Simmons College), and grant number NSF/IIS-0333036 (2005-2007). During 2000-2002, the project, then titled Chinese Memory Net, was more limited in scope. However, the core collection of the project has leveraged the results and products of Prof. Chen's 20-year interactive videodisc and multimedia project, PROJECT EMPEROR-I, initially supported by the US National Endowment for the Humanity’s Library Program (1983-1986). The project's by-products, both the interactive videodisc and multimedia CD, entitled The First Emperor of China, published by The Voyager Company, include an image collection of over 4000 images together with extensive descriptive annotations. "Content" is the real substance of any digital library, thus, these images have become the initial core collection of CMNet and then GMNet. It is clear that without the extensive earlier efforts, the current project would not be possible.

Partners - Since 2000, the Global Memory Net has had many collaborators (referred to as "Partners") in both technology and content development. For a quick listing of technology-oriented collaboration, click on the Partners section of the Home Page; more information on them as well as access to joint research papers is available here. Since 2000 Prof. Chen has devoted much of her effort in developing collaborative infrastructure and community building around the world for Global Memory Net. For this reason, content collaborators are growing fast and too many to list individually. Each will be described in the introduction of each image collection project.

Content, Metadata and Web-Page Development at Simmons - Since 2000, Prof. Chen has supervised many graduate and undergraduate students as part of her research group at Simmons. In addition to these research assistants, GMNet was fortunate to be able to have 7 visiting researchers from China, Croatia and Vietnam in the second half of 2005. They have contributed greatly to GMNet by adding the invaluable and unique collections of their organizations to the site. This is an excellent example on the results of international collaboration. More detailed information on this section is available from Content Development.

Technology Development - Under Prof. Chen's conceptual guidance and new web interface design and development, GMNet's in-house LINUX/MySQL/PHP-based Integrated Multimedia Content Retrieval System (i-M-C-S) has been developed since the second half of 2005 with specific contribution from three visiting researchers from Croatia and China – Boris Badurina, Shengqiang Zhang and Xiaobo Xiao. After their returns to their home countries, Boris Badurina continues his technology development effort with GMNet. GMNet is also fortunate to collaborate with Prof. James Z. Wang of Penn State University. We are currently using his SIMPLIcity for advanced content-based image retrieval. More detailed information on this section is available from Technology Development.

In addition, additional funding was received in 2003 from NSF to enable us to advance user-oriented technologies for managing and distributing images in digital libraries under NSF/IIS-0333036 (PI: Ching-chih Chen, Co-PIs: James Z. Wang and Jianbo Shi, September 2004-August 2006). The project is jointly conducted by Simmons College, The Pennsylvania State University, and University of Pennsylvania. Results of this project will be incorporated as part of GMNet when appropriate.