D igital L ibraries Digital Dreams, or Digital Realities?

On Digital Libraries Outline of Presentation of Notes:  Historical Perspectives  What is a “Digital Library”?  Categories of DLs  Philosophical foundations  Functional foundations  Overview of current research  Opportunities for professional involvement  Challenges and opportunities  Problems with DLs

Historical Perspectives: Libraries as private collectionsLibraries as private collections Libraries as Public InstitutionsLibraries as Public Institutions Libraries as “place”Libraries as “place”

“Libraries as place have grown to be increasingly expensive, more costly than even government can afford to maintain” Paul Evan Peters in a speech to MU-ITG

What is a “Digital Library”? A broad pair of terms open to wide interpretation depending on motives and perspective. Here are some expert opinions from the research oriented perspective:

Dr. Edward A. Fox Department of Computer Science and Director, Project Envision Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University “An assemblage of digital computers, storage, and communications machinery together with the content and software needed to produce, emulate, and extend those services provided by conventional libraries based on paper and other material means of collecting, cataloging, finding and disseminating information.”

Categories of DLs  Book-oriented collections  Manuscripts  Electronic journals  Pointer sites

Book-oriented collections Project Gutenberg ( is considered by many to be the “first real” digital library. Founded by Michael Hart in 1971, who personally keyed in the Declaration of Independence, this DL has more than 4000 texts available in simple ASCII text format. Volunteers help create the content, which consists primarily of copyright-free books and manuscripts. Considered by some to be the most significant book-oriented project, the Making of America ( project at the University of Michigan focuses on primary source materials drawn from 19 th century American social history, this resource holds more than 8500 books and some 50,000 journal articles. It has some rather unique options for presenting images, text and PDF files.

Manuscripts Blurring the previously strict delineation between archives and libraries is the collection of papers from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln ( ( both part of the American Memory project and maintained by the Library of Congress. Washington’s “archives” contain some 65,000 documents (and we thought we were doing good with the Truman Archives!) making this the largest collection of original Washington documents in the world. Document types in the collection as a whole include correspondence, letterbooks, commonplace books, diaries, journals, financial account books, military records, reports, and notes accumulated by Washington from 1741 through Similarly, Lincoln’s content contains about 20,000 items from the 1850s through Lincoln's presidential years, Treasures include Lincoln's draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Electronic journals We hope to be discussing E-journals later in the class, but for now think about these as being classified as either commercial sites, semi-commercial sites, or free E-journal sites. I’ll try to provide an example of each: Elsevier’s Science Direct maintains over 1700 journal titles online, containing millions of peer-reviewed articles. The site offers both browsing and searching of these titles. Elsevier is the leading publisher (both print and electronic) of scientific journals (and guess what, they are for profit!). Project Muse is an example of a “semi-commercial” journal archive, as is JSTOR Muse covers about 200 or so journals in the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and in mathematics. Both Project Muse and JSTOR limit access to members of subscribing institutions. See if MU is one of them!

Pointer sites These sites primarily “point” or link to other Web sites. They may contain some contribution of their own, or make use of other links in a unique fashion (such as an educational pointer site ), but for the most part contain up-to-date links to other’s works on the Web. One of the first attempts to create a guide to the WWW was not from a librarian per se, but from Tim Berners-Lee, the man oft credited with creating the Web itself ( Note the use of the word “virtual”. Others may be familiar with the Internet Public Library, but few remember as a 1995 class project in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. It too, can be considered a “pointer site”. An interesting educational pointer site is Tefko Saracevic’s site D-Lib Education found at:

Philosophical foundations Philosophical foundations Two basic assumptions: Knowledge is power Access to recorded knowledge has always been the key to the advancement of society

Information today is often simultaneously everywhere and No place in particular. This differs from the notion of “library as place”

Functional foundations of a Digital Library Functional foundations of a Digital Library.Create and capture.Storage and management.Search and access.Distribution.Rights management

Opportunities for professional involvement:  Collection development  Organizing principles  Universal points of access  Research in retrieval  User studies  End user training  Standards participation  Cost recovery

Challenges and opportunities: How to deal with the enormous archive of previously published works now in print  Continued deployment of a global information technology infrastructure  Development of tools in support of networked information retrieval  Dealing with copyright issues  Adherence to (and development of) standards for interoperability  Inclusion of user-centered design principles  Administrative commitment  Continued sources of funds for research, development, implementation, and testing of digital library prototypes or projects

Problems with DLs:  Content is distributed  Content is often unregulated (quality control)  Digital content is highly variable (dynamic)  Digital content is often difficult to track in terms of location  Content lacking context has less meaning/value  Notion of “collection” is absent  Ownership/copyright considerations  Archival role – who is responsible?  Lack of preceding economic models

Personal Digital Libraries Is this where we are headed?