ECDL 2002 was the 6th conference in the series of European Conferences on Research and Advanced Technologies for Digital Libraries. Following previous events in Pisa (1997), Heraklion (1998), Paris (1999), Lisbon (2000), and Da- stadt (2001), this year ECDL was held in Rome. ECDL 2002 contributed, - gether with the previous conferences, to establishing ECDL as the major - ropean forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues. ECDL 2002 continued the tradition already established by the previous conferences in meeting the needs of a large and diverse constituency, which includes researchers, practitioners, educators, policy makers, and users. The focus of ECDL 2002 was on underlying principles, methods, systems, and tools to build and make available e?ective digital libraries to end users. Architecture, metadata, collection building, web archiving, web technologies,- books, OAI applications, preservation, navigation, query languages, audio video retrieval, multimedia-mixed media, user studies and evaluation, humanities, and digital libraries were some of the key issues addressed. An international Program Committee was set up composed of 61 members, with representatives from 25 countries. A total of 145 paper submissions, 15 poster submissions, and 18 proposals for demos were received. Each paper was evaluated by 3 referees and 42 full papers and 6 short papers of high quality were selected for presentation.