This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, ECDL 2008, held in Aarhus, Denmark, in September 2008. The 28 revised full papers and 10 revised short papers presented together with 1 panel description, the extended abstracts of 24 revised poster and demo papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 125 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on digital preservation, social tagging, quatations and annotations, user studies and system evaluation, from content-centric to person-centric systems, citation analysis, collection building, user interfaces and personalization, interoperability, information retrieval, and metadata generation.