Welcome to the second installment of DL Pearls. This month, I'll begin by trying to give you some sense of the enormity of this undertaking. I used the metaphor of an island in an anatomical sense. As anatomical islands are clusters of cells that differ in structure or function than those of the surrounding tissue, so digital libraries are clusters of documents whose structure or function is different from other documents within the surrounding digital network.
Digital libraries are more than collections of documents, or clusters of hyperlinks.
The ACM DL library is indeed an island in the path of what society has found to be the most important economic trade route in history. To give you some idea of the population of our island, the ACM DL currently contains 865 proceedings volumes representing 45,806 individual articles, and 1857 journal issues offering another 18,210 articles. Between the conference proceedings and the journal articles, there are at this writing 64,016 individual articles in the ACM Digital Library database, and there's plenty more to come. Not all of the ACM archives are scheduled to come online until late Spring, 2001. This is not to mention the 18,175 abstracts of articles that are included and 2,654 reviews of articles from Computing Reviews with about 500 more coming online soon.