Digital Libraries Workshop Bruce Schatz Appendix 3-3 Library Perspectives Introduction 1. Priorities and Recommendations. Thus, there was a strong concentration on retrieval from existing collections, rather than on generation of new materials. This focus provided a significant discussion on problems of search, and largely omitted problems of publishing. The library perspective might be summarized as building and maintaining large distributed repositories.
Repositories are the technology to support users in search sessions across collections.
In information infrastructure such as digital libraries, the technology and systems cannot exist alone in the absence of users and collections. Most of the discussion in this group centered around the important research issues for repositories, with the hopes of encouraging research and funding into solutions of these issues. The issues are discussed below, preceded by a brief philosophical discussion, and followed by a prioritization of the most pressing research issues. An extended discussion of digital libraries made it clear that the defining factor is searching large collections. The key to a digital library is not yhr digitization of physical materials, but the organization of an electronic collection for better access.