1. Tefko Saracevic, Rutgers University
CoLIS 3 Third International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science
Digital Libraries:
Interdisciplinary conceptions, challenges, opportunities
Dubrovnik, Croatia May 1999
The examples of libraries and library tools from antiquity to this day show the fact that libraries are quite remarkable institutions - over millennia they played a significant role in great many civilizations and cultures. They are fundamental to collection, organization, preservation, dissemination, and use of human knowledge records. The remarkable thing that we tend to forget sometimes is that libraries maintained that role across boundaries of time, geography, cultures, historical periods, and technology. As technologies change so do libraries.
Today I will be talking about a new kind of library. The digital library. A library that has just begun its evolution. But at the same time it has caught a lot of attention.

2. Digital libraries: Historical connections
Tefko Saracevic, Rutgers University
Digital libraries: Historical connections
From antiquity -
an unbroken line

3. Tefko Saracevic, Rutgers University
Before I start my talk I would like to provide a historical perspective and indicate historical relationships between concepts through a few pictures.
This picture is a “book.” Among the oldest existing artifacts of a book. The time period is early 18th dynasty in ancient Egypt, circa 1550 B.C.
The technology is a wooden board, prepared with a layer of gesso (plaster, gypsum) to provide a reusable writing surface. A hole (on the right) provided means of suspending it from a peg with a cord.
The board is the only copy of the Word of Khakheperraseneb, a literary discourse concerning personal and social chaos.

4. Tefko Saracevic, Rutgers University
This is another kind of book. A digital borne book, never saw the light of a day - exists in cyberspace. The technology is digital texts with hyperlinks to many sights of various textual and image materials.
It was created at the Scholarly Communication Center, Alexander Library, Rutgers University. It came from a joint porject with Rutgers University libraries and a number of school libraries in New Jersey. The aim of the project is to teach New Jersey history to high school students using the Web as an interactive teaching tool.
There are three and a half millennia separating the two books, not to talk about cultures and technologies but the basic concept and purpose remain the same

5. Tefko Saracevic, Rutgers University
This is a catalog card.
The technology is a baked and glazed clay tablet from the 600’s B.C. listing literary works, probably for use in the Royal Library at Niniveh in Babylonia. The Mesopotamians made thousands of such tablets for huge libraries.
The ideas for intellectual organization of knowledge and use of the technology of the day for catalogs providing access to that organized knowledge has a long, long history.

6. Tefko Saracevic, Rutgers University
This is another catalog. An Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) at the Alexander Library, Rutgers University.
The technology is digital. Yet it has the same basic role for organizing knowledge to enable access, as did the Babylonian clay tablet of 2700 years ago..

7. Tefko Saracevic, Rutgers University
This is a library. A depiction of the Alexandria Library in Alexandria, Egypt - the most famous library in the ancient world. Alexander the Great founded the Library in 330 B.C. His successors, Ptolomy I. And Ptolomy II., developed the Alexandria library into the greatest collection of texts, scrolls, in the ancient world.
The ideas behind the Alexandria Library can be found in every research library in the world. And they are present in many efforts in building of digital library collections. Only now, the scrolls are digital.

8. Tefko Saracevic, Rutgers University
This is a picture of a modern section of a library.
This is the new Scholarly Communication Center, Alexander Library, Rutgers University, including, among others, the Information Handlng Labs, the Humanities and Social Sciences Data center, and the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities. It is a digital library providing access to a number of digital collections, catalogs, and the like, with a number of facets for use of the digital technology and information resources.
Yet the counterpart of the basic concepts embedded in the idea of the Scholarly Communication Center can be found in the Alexandria Library of 2300 years ago.

9. Tefko Saracevic, Rutgers University
This is a monk in a scriptorium studying a manuscript and copying it by hand. Such laborious work by medieval monks helped preserve writings of ancient times for scholars and libraries of today. In this way scrioriums in monasteries made a major contribution to preservation and distribution of knowledge, beginning in the late 400’s A.D.

10. Tefko Saracevic, Rutgers University
This is a modern ‘monk’ - a humanities scholar doing research and creating different kinds of manuscripts at the Center for Electronic Texts in Humanities, Alexander library, Rutgers University.
Separated by 1600 years and vastly different technologies the basic purpose of their pursuits were the same.