Building a Digital Library: Concepts and Issues (1996)

INTRODUCTION WHAT IS A DIGITAL LIBRARY? This report will try to explain the issues that need to be considered when building a digital library. It is intended to fill in the information gaps between merely knowing digital library concepts and having a sense of the kind of digital libraries already being built by large library organizations and understanding what is involved in their creation and functioning. Digital libraries are not exclusively the concern of large institutions or large research universities. Every library in any kind of organization that begins to move beyond bibliographic citations to providing online content for its patrons has begun to build a digital library. Thus, digital libraries can be built by public libraries, school libraries, and university and college libraries. For a long time electronic collection building efforts have centered around information which is a step to other information. Whatever the value of this information, its online presence can not be said to constitute a digital library. These resources are simply tools to find content. It is this final content and its availability in digital form that distinguishes a digital library. Actual digital library holdings, not just digital pointers to print resources, are what it takes to involve libraries in digital library building. The intended holdings need not be vast or managed by sophisticated software. A library that maintains a Gopher or WWW page with pointers to Internet resources (whether those be images, text, or other forms of information) has begun to build a digital library: it is evaluating and selecting among available digital resources and their delivery systems. The resources in a digital library may be local or maintained remotely by a vendor like OCLC. They may be widely held like the popular periodical databases created by EBSCO, UMI, and IAC, or newer types of complex information resources like the geographic data files maintained by only a few institutions. WHAT KIND OF DIGITAL LIBRARIES WILL BE DISCUSSED? This report is about Internet digital libraries, not resources mounted and made available on a local LAN. It discusses digital libraries that use the Internet and standard Internet protocols, TCP/IP and HTTP, for communication. The report is primarily about digital library services provided over the WWW and accessed through a WWW browser like Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. But the next generation of web software systems, which will move beyond browser and HTTP protocol use, are also described. Some kinds of systems will not be included in this report, such as CD-ROM LANs, Gopher servers, VT100 interfaces, and proprietary Windows clients. All these fall outside of the scope of this discussion. DIGITAL LIBRARY BUILDING IS AN ART Since digital library building is new to most librarians, it is a skill that must be learned in order to make intelligent decisions-even if the only decision made is not to begin. This report will attempt to teach some of the arts of digital library building by describing the human and technological ingredients that are needed, including staff, networks, and communications mechanisms, as well as the particular kind of technologies used to manage digital content, including images, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, text, and numeric data. In a way, this report is akin to the genre of library science books that for years have attempted to prepare librarians who will have some responsibility for the building of physical libraries. Those books will not make their readers capable of designing a plumbing system for a library, but they may alert the reader to some important concerns and the goals for such a system. They prepare librarians to undertake building projects by giving them the language to be able to deal with specialists and a sense of the questions to ask. …