Since its inception in 1997, the EuropeanConferenceon Researchand Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL) has come a long way, creating a strong interdisciplinarycommunityofresearchersandpractitionersinthe?eldofdigital libraries. We are proud to present the proceedings of ECDL 2005, the ninth conference in this series, which, following Pisa (1997), Heraklion (1998), Paris (1999), Lisbon (2000), Darmstadt (2001), Rome (2002), Trondheim (2003), and Bath (2004), took place on September 18 23, 2005 in Vienna, Austria. ECDL 2005 featured separate calls for paper and poster submissions, resu- ing in 130 full papers and 32 posters being submitted to the conference. All - pers were subject to a thorough peer-review process, with an 87-person-strong Program Committee and a further 68 additional reviewers from 35 countries from basically all continents sharing the tremendous review load, producing - tween three and four detailed reviews per paper. Based on these, as well as on the discussion that took place during a one-week on-line PC discussion phase, 41 papers were ?nally selected for inclusion in the conference program during a 1. 5 day PC meeting, resulting in an acceptance rate of only 32%. Furthermore, 17 paper submissions were accepted for poster presentations with an additional 13 posters being accepted based on a simpli?ed review process of 2 3 reviews per poster from the poster submission track. Both the full papers as well as extended abstracts of the posters presented at ECDL 2005 are provided in these proceedings."

The 9th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, EDBT 2004, was held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, during March 14-18, 2004. The EDBT series of conferences is an established and prestigious forum for the exchange of the latest research results in data management. Held every two years in an attractive European location, the conference provides unique opp- tunities for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore new ideas, techniques, and tools, and to exchange experiences. The previous events were held in Venice, Vienna, Cambridge, Avignon, Valencia, Konstanz, and Prague. EDBT 2004 had the theme "new challenges for database technology," with the goal of encouraging researchers to take a greater interest in the current exciting technological and application advancements and to devise and address new research and development directions for database technology. From its early days, database technology has been challenged and advanced by new uses and applications, and it continues to evolve along with application requirements and hardware advances. Today's DBMS technology faces yet several new challenges. Technological trends and new computation paradigms, and applications such as pervasive and ubiquitous computing, grid computing, bioinformatics, trust management, virtual communities, and digital asset management, to name just a few, require database technology to be deployed in a variety of environments and for a number of di?erent purposes. Such an extensive deployment will also require trustworthy, resilient database systems, as well as easy-to-manage and ?exible ones, to which we can entrust our data in whatever form they are.