this paper is funded by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation (DEB-9505383 and DEB-9626806).

Digital libraries can be regarded as virtual spaces in which collaborative scholarly research can be conducted. Floristic digital libraries provide such collaboration spaces for scientists working on solutions for Earth's biodiversity problems. However, group awareness and collaboration are not easily achieved in an increasingly distributed environment such as the virtual space in which digital library users (particularly botanists and biologists) do their work. We describe an environment that enables group awareness, communication, and collaboration among users in a globally accessible floristic digital library. This is achieved by extending existing library facilities with recommendation and alerting services, as well as various communication interfaces.

This paper describes a solution to the problem of communication among components of a highly distributed digital library.