The International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL) is an annual international forum for participants to exchange research results, innovative ideas, and state-of-the-art developments in digital libraries. Built upon the successes of the first four ICADL conferences, the 5th ICADL Conference in Singapore was aimed at further strengthening the position of ICADL as a premier digital library conference that draws high quality papers and presentations from all around the world, while meeting the needs and interests of digital library communities in the Asia-Pacific region. The theme of the conference, "Digital Libraries: People, Knowledge & Technology," reflects the shared belief of the organizers that success in the development and implementation of digital libraries lies in the achievement of three key areas: the richness and depth of content to meet the needs of the communities they intend to serve; the technologies that are employed to build user-centered environments through organization, interaction, and provision of access to that content; and the human elements of management policies, maintenance, and vision necessary to keep pace with new content, new technologies, and changing user needs.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Asian Digitial Libraries, ICADL 2002, held in Singapore in December 2002.The 34 revised full papers, 20 revised short papers, and 14 posters presented together with 7 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 170 submissions. The papers are organized in sections on information retrieval, multimedia digital libraries, data mining in digital libraries, special purpose digital libraries, digital library services, digital libraries for community building, information retrieval and Asian languages, building and using digital libraries, metadata issues, algorithms and protocols, human-computer interaction, and digital library infrastructure.