Among the proposed innovations in the Clinton Administration's plans to develop a National Information Infrastructure is the creation of, and support for, digital or electronic libraries to store and provide access to the vast amounts of information expected to made available over the \information superhighway". Although the exact nature and future architecture of such libraries is still a matter for experimentation (and debate), there are several pioneering e orts underway to establish electronic libraries and to provide access to them. This paper describes one such e ort underway at the University of California at Berkeley. In collaboration with four other universities we are developing interoperable electronic library servers containing the Computer Science technical reports for each participant and making them available over the internet using standard protocols.

We present and analyze algorithms for the automated segmentation and classification of layout structures in electronic documents. The key idea is to use the patterns in the distribution of white space in a document to recognize and interpret its components. The segmentation algorithm divides the document into a hierarchy of logical elements; the classification algorithms classify these divisions as base-text, tables, indented lists, polygonal drawings, and graphs. We present experimental data and discuss an information access application. Our methodology allows the automatic markup of documents (for instance in the sgml format) and the creation of multi-level indices and browsing tools for electronic libraries. Keywords: document analysis, document structure, information capture and access 1 Introduction In today's continuously growing digital information landscape, locating useful information requires flexible browsing and searching capabilities. Existing tools include word-based sy...