The Biggest Barrier Niemann said funding, more than technology, has limited what CEIS has been able to include in its online collection. The content is endless. According to NSF's Lesk, economic constraints, together with legal obstacles faced by agencies that want to distribute copyrighted data, form the main barriers to setting up digital libraries. Government libraries hold lots of materials to which they don't have the intellectual-property rights,'' said Bob Zich, director of electronic programs with the Library of Congress' National Digital Library program. Legislation pending in Congress aims to set rules governing copyrights online, but librarians and researchers, including an LOC official, have testified that these proposals could hamper public access to electronic materials in library collections.
Accessibility is another hurdle that agencies face.
LOC started distributing copies of historic photographs and documents on disc eight years ago and now makes about 500,000 images, maps, film clips, audio files and texts available through its American Memory Web site. One such tool, under development by the NSF-backed San Diego Supercomputing Center and IBM Corp., offers a method for retrieving documents from different storage platforms. We haven't seen too many people trying to address this issue of trying to get to data on heterogeneous storage devices,'' he added. The project, part of a test bed for a paperless system to apply for patents, integrates IBM's High Performance Storage System, which is used to manage large data files for supercomputing applications, with a relational database. To find files, users query a database that holds a metadata directory, and a middleware application that the team has developed communicates the query to remote storage systems.