Today the dream of a Universal Library is very much alive, envisaged now as a digital library distributed across the Internet. The future of the library turns out to be intimately intertwined with the future of the Internet. This is a drive to get 5 million items from the library's vast collection digitized and online by the year 2000. Indeed champagne is an appropriate metaphor for the showcase multimedia exhibits already made available. And yet, though these are beautiful exhibits, they make up a dilettante's digital library.
Users are overwhelmingly school students and casual Web visitors.
The subset of material so far digitized is less than half of one percent of the whole 111 million item Library of Congress collection. This is not a digital library from which scholars, students, and professionals of every description could do wide-ranging research for real work. In its crowd-pleasing spectacle and incompleteness it is literally a library for the browser rather than the serious researcher. Unfortunately, even thinking of the NDL as a gallant beginning with promise of universality to come is too sanguine. The economic reality is that library budgets cannot carry the burden of digitizing complete collections.