Contents:
- 1. What is a Library? 2. Brief Digital Library History
- 3. Moving Toward a More User-centric Architecture
- 4. General Processes and Stages of Technological Development
- 5. The Importance of Standards
- 6. The Next Stage: Moving from Isolated Digital Collections to Interoperable Digital Libraries.
This article which appeared in the online journal First Monday (Volume 17, Number 6, June 2002) examines where digital libraries need to go in order to provide the basis components traditional libraries do (including service to a clientele, stewardship over a collection, sustainability, the ability to find material that exists outside that collection and ethics related issues such as full access to information). After describing the development of digital libraries, it goes on to describe the functions (such as infrastructure, robust metadata, and preservation components) that must be deployed to move from isolated digital collections to interoperable digital libraries.
This foresighted article is an important resource for those seeking an overview of what digital libraries require in order to assume the role traditional libraries have played in the past. It provides a well formulated description of traditional libraries and clearly makes its case on how digital libraries need to develop in order to play a similar role in communities. In particular, its description of efforts to define structural metadata, administrative metadata, identification metadata (particularly for images), and longevity metadata, critical to real interoperable digital libraries, is very good. The emphasis on the need for digital libraries to incorporate ethical traditions such as users’ rights to access content, and to do so with some degree of privacy or anonymity, is also interesting.