Digital library

A digital library is a special library with a focused collection of digital objects that can include text, visual material, audio material, video material, stored as electronic media formats (as opposed to print, microform, or other media), along with means for organizing, storing, and retrieving the files and media contained in the library collection. Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals, organizations, or affiliated with established physical library buildings or institutions, or with academic institutions.[1] The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. An electronic library is a type of information retrieval system.

Software implementation

Institutional repository software is designed for archiving, organizing, and searching a library's content. Popular open-source solutions include DSpace, EPrints, Digital Commons, and Fedora Commons-based systems Islandora and Hydra.[2]

History

Early projects centered on the creation of an electronic card catalogue known as Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). By the 1980s, the success of these endeavors resulted in OPAC replacing the traditional card catalog in many academic, public and special libraries. This permitted libraries to undertake additional rewarding co-operative efforts to support resource sharing and expand access to library materials beyond an individual library.

An early example of a digital library is the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) which was "born digital" in 1966.[3]

Terminology

The term digital libraries was first popularized by the NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative in 1994.[4] These draw heavily on Vannevar Bush's essay As We May Think (1945), which set out a vision not in terms of technology, but user experience. The term virtual library was initially used interchangeably with digital library, but is now primarily used for libraries that are virtual in other senses (such as libraries which aggregate distributed content). In the early days of digital libraries, there was discussion of the similarities and differences among the terms digital, virtual, and electronic.[5]

In the context of the DELOS, a Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, and DL.org, a Coordination Action on Digital Library Interoperability, Best Practices and Modelling Foundations, Digital Library researchers and practitioners and software developer produced a Digital Library Reference Model[6][7] which defines a digital library as: "A potentially virtual organization, that comprehensively collects, manages and preserves for the long depth of time rich digital content, and offers to its targeted user communities specialized functionality on that content, of defined quality and according to comprehensive codified policies."[8]

A distinction is often made between content that was created in a digital format, known as born-digital, and information that has been converted from a physical medium, e.g. paper, through digitization. It should also be noted that not all electronic content is in digital data format. The term hybrid library is sometimes used for libraries that have both physical collections and electronic collections. For example, American Memory is a digital library within the Library of Congress.

Some important digital libraries also serve as long term archives, such as arXiv and the Internet Archive. Others, such as the Digital Public Library of America, seek to make digital information from various institutions widely accessible online.[9]

Academic repositories

Many academic libraries are actively involved in building institutional repositories of the institution's books, papers, theses, and other works which can be digitized or were 'born digital'. Many of these repositories are made available to the general public with few restrictions, in accordance with the goals of open access, in contrast to the publication of research in commercial journals, where the publishers often limit access rights. Institutional, truly free, and corporate repositories are sometimes referred to as digital libraries.

Digital archives

Physical [archives] differ from physical libraries in several ways. Traditionally, archives are defined as:

  1. Containing primary sources of information (typically letters and papers directly produced by an individual or organization) rather than the secondary sources found in a library (books, periodicals, etc.).
  2. Having their contents organized in groups rather than individual items.
  3. Having unique contents.

The technology used to create digital libraries is even more revolutionary for archives since it breaks down the second and third of these general rules. In other words, "digital archives" or "online archives" will still generally contain primary sources, but they are likely to be described individually rather than (or in addition to) in groups or collections. Further, because they are digital, their contents are easily reproducible and may indeed have been reproduced from elsewhere. The Oxford Text Archive is generally considered to be the oldest digital archive of academic physical primary source materials.

The future

Large scale digitization projects are underway at Google, the Million Book Project, and Internet Archive. With continued improvements in book handling and presentation technologies such as optical character recognition and development of alternative depositories and business models, digital libraries are rapidly growing in popularity. Just as libraries have ventured into audio and video collections, so have digital libraries such as the Internet Archive. Google Books project recently received a court victory on proceeding with their book-scanning project that was halted by the Authors' guild. This helped open the road for libraries to work with Google to better reach patrons who are accustomed to computerized information.

According to Larry Lannom, Director of Information Management Technology at the nonprofit Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), "all the problems associated with digital libraries are wrapped up in archiving." He goes on to state, "If in 100 years people can still read your article, we'll have solved the problem." Daniel Akst, author of The Webster Chronicle, proposes that "the future of libraries — and of information — is digital." Peter Lyman and Hal Variant, information scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, estimate that "the world's total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage." Therefore, they believe that "soon it will be technologically possible for an average person to access virtually all recorded information."[10]

Searching

Most digital libraries provide a search interface which allows resources to be found. These resources are typically deep web (or invisible web) resources since they frequently cannot be located by search engine crawlers. Some digital libraries create special pages or sitemaps to allow search engines to find all their resources. Digital libraries frequently use the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to expose their metadata to other digital libraries, and search engines like Google Scholar, Yahoo! and Scirus can also use OAI-PMH to find these deep web resources.[11]

There are two general strategies for searching a federation of digital libraries: distributed searching and searching previously harvested metadata.

Distributed searching typically involves a client sending multiple search requests in parallel to a number of servers in the federation. The results are gathered, duplicates are eliminated or clustered, and the remaining items are sorted and presented back to the client. Protocols like Z39.50 are frequently used in distributed searching. A benefit to this approach is that the resource-intensive tasks of indexing and storage are left to the respective servers in the federation. A drawback to this approach is that the search mechanism is limited by the different indexing and ranking capabilities of each database; therefore, making it difficult to assemble a combined result consisting of the most relevant found items.

Searching over previously harvested metadata involves searching a locally stored index of information that has previously been collected from the libraries in the federation. When a search is performed, the search mechanism does not need to make connections with the digital libraries it is searching - it already has a local representation of the information. This approach requires the creation of an indexing and harvesting mechanism which operates regularly, connecting to all the digital libraries and querying the whole collection in order to discover new and updated resources. OAI-PMH is frequently used by digital libraries for allowing metadata to be harvested. A benefit to this approach is that the search mechanism has full control over indexing and ranking algorithms, possibly allowing more consistent results. A drawback is that harvesting and indexing systems are more resource-intensive and therefore expensive.

Software

There are a number of software packages for use in general digital libraries, for notable ones see Digital library software. Institutional repository software, which focuses primarily on ingest, preservation and access of locally produced documents, particularly locally produced academic outputs, can be found in Institutional repository software. This software may be proprietary, as is the case with the Library of Congress which uses Digiboard and CTS to manage digital content.[12]

Digitization

In the past few years, procedures for digitizing books at high speed and comparatively low cost have improved considerably with the result that it is now possible to digitize millions of books per year.[13] Google book-scanning project is also working with libraries to offer digitize books pushing forward on the digitize book realm.

Advantages

The advantages of digital libraries as a means of easily and rapidly accessing books, archives and images of various types are now widely recognized by commercial interests and public bodies alike.[14]

Traditional libraries are limited by storage space; digital libraries have the potential to store much more information, simply because digital information requires very little physical space to contain it.[15] As such, the cost of maintaining a digital library can be much lower than that of a traditional library. A physical library must spend large sums of money paying for staff, book maintenance, rent, and additional books. Digital libraries may reduce or, in some instances, do away with these fees. Both types of library require cataloging input to allow users to locate and retrieve material. Digital libraries may be more willing to adopt innovations in technology providing users with improvements in electronic and audio book technology as well as presenting new forms of communication such as wikis and blogs; conventional libraries may consider that providing online access to their OP AC catalog is sufficient. An important advantage to digital conversion is increased accessibility to users. They also increase availability to individuals who may not be traditional patrons of a library, due to geographic location or organizational affiliation.

Digital preservation

Main article: Digital preservation

Digital preservation aims to ensure that digital media and information systems are still interpretable into the indefinite future.[17] [18] Each necessary component of this must be migrated, preserved or emulated.[19] Typically lower levels of systems (floppy disks for example) are emulated, bit-streams (the actual files stored in the disks) are preserved and operating systems are emulated as a virtual machine. Only where the meaning and content of digital media and information systems are well understood is migration possible, as is the case for office documents.[19][20][21] However, at least one organization, the Wider Net Project, has created an offline digital library, the e Granary, by reproducing materials on a 4 TB hard drive. Instead of a bit-stream environment, the digital library contains a built-in proxy server and search engine so the digital materials can be accessed using an Internet browser.[22] Also, the materials are not preserved for the future. The e Granary is intended for use in places or situations where Internet connectivity is very slow, non-existent, unreliable, unsuitable or too expensive.

Copyright and licensing

Digital libraries are hampered by copyright law because, unlike with traditional printed works, the laws of digital copyright are still being formed. The republication of material on the web by libraries may require permission from rights holders, and there is a conflict of interest between libraries and the publishers who may wish to create online versions of their acquired content for commercial purposes. In 2010, it was estimated that twenty-three percent of books in existence were created before 1923 and thus out of copyright. Of those printed after this date, only five percent were still in print as of 2010. Thus, approximately seventy-two percent of books were not available to the public.[23]

There is a dilution of responsibility that occurs as a result of the distributed nature of digital resources. Complex intellectual property matters may become involved since digital material is not always owned by a library.[24] The content is, in many cases, public domain or self-generated content only. Some digital libraries, such as Project Gutenberg, work to digitize out-of-copyright works and make them freely available to the public. An estimate of the number of distinct books still existent in library catalogues from 2000 BC to 1960, has been made.[25][26]

The Fair Use Provisions (17 USC § 107) under the Copyright Act of 1976 provide specific guidelines under which circumstances libraries are allowed to copy digital resources. Four factors that constitute fair use are "Purpose of the use, Nature of the work, Amount or substantiality used and Market impact."[27]

Some digital libraries acquire a license to lend their resources. This may involve the restriction of lending out only one copy at a time for each license, and applying a system of digital rights management for this purpose (see also above).

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was an act created in the United States to attempt to deal with the introduction of digital works. This Act incorporates two treaties from the year 1996. It criminalizes the attempt to circumvent measures which limit access to copyrighted materials. It also criminalizes the act of attempting to circumvent access control.[28] This act provides an exemption for nonprofit libraries and archives which allows up to three copies to be made, one of which may be digital. This may not be made public or distributed on the web, however. Further, it allows libraries and archives to copy a work if its format becomes obsolete.[29]

Copyright issues persist. As such, proposals have been put forward suggesting that digital libraries be exempt from copyright law. Although this would be very beneficial to the public, it may have a negative economic effect and authors may be less inclined to create new works.[30]

Another issue that complicates matters is the desire of some publishing houses to restrict the use of digit materials such as e-books purchased by libraries. Whereas with printed books, the library owns the book until it can no longer be circulated, publishers want to limit the number of times an e-book can be checked out before the library would need to repurchase that book. "[HarperCollins] began licensing use of each e-book copy for a maximum of 26 loans. This affects only the most popular titles and has no practical effect on others. After the limit is reached, the library can repurchase access rights at a lower cost than the original price." [31] While from a publishing perspective, this sounds like a good balance of library lending and protecting themselves from a feared decrease in book sales, libraries are not set up to monitor their collections as such. They acknowledge the increased demand of digital materials available to patrons and the desire of a digital library to become expanded to include best sellers, but publisher licensing may hinder the process...

Metadata creation

In traditional libraries, the ability to find works of interest is directly related to how well they were cataloged. While cataloging electronic works digitized from a library's existing holding may be as simple as copying or moving a record from the print to the electronic form, complex and born-digital works require substantially more effort. To handle the growing volume of electronic publications, new tools and technologies have to be designed to allow effective automated semantic classification and searching. While full text search can be used for some items, there are many common catalog searches which cannot be performed using full text, including:

Disadvantages

Digital libraries, or at least their digital collections, unfortunately also have brought their own problems and challenges in areas such as:[32]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Witten, Ian H., Bainbridge, David Nichols.Accessed January 31, 2014.
  2. ↑ Michel, Castagné,. "Institutional repository software comparison: DSpace, EPrints, Digital Commons, Islandora and Hydra". open.library.ubc.ca. Retrieved 2016-04-25.
  3. ↑ Bell, Suzanne (2015). Librarian's Guide to Online Searching: Cultivating Database Skills for Research and Instruction, 4th Edition: Cultivating Database Skills for Research and Instruction. p. 69. ISBN 1610699998.
  4. ↑ Edward A. Fox. The Digital Libraries Initiative - Update and Discussion, Bulletin of the America Society of Information Science, Vol. 26, No 1, October/November 1999.
  5. ↑ "digital libraries, electronic libraries and virtual libraries". www2.hawaii.edu. Retrieved 2016-01-18.
  6. ↑ L. Candela, G. Athanasopoulos, D. Castelli, K. El Raheb, P. Innocenti, Y. Ioannidis, A. Katifori, A. Nika, G. Vullo, S. Ross: The Digital Library Reference Model. April 2011 (PDF)
  7. ↑ L. Candela et al.: The DELOS Digital Library Reference Model - Foundations for Digital Libraries. Version 0.98, February 2008 (PDF)
  8. ↑ L. Candela, G. Athanasopoulos, D. Castelli, K. El Raheb, P. Innocenti, Y. Ioannidis, A. Katifori, A. Nika, G. Vullo, S. Ross: The Digital Library Reference Model
  9. ↑ Yi, Esther, Inside the Quest to Put the World's Libraries Online, The Atlantic, July 26, 2012.
  10. ↑ Akst, D. (2003). The Digital Library: Its Future Has Arrived. Carnegie Reporter, 2(3), 4-8.
  11. ↑ Koehler, AEC. Some Thoughts on the Meaning of Open Access for University Library Technical Services Serials Review Vol. 32, 1, 2006, p. 17
  12. ↑ "DPOE Curriculum - Manage and implement requirements for long term management". The Library of Congress. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
  13. ↑ Committee on Institutional Cooperation: Partnership announced between CIC and Google, 6 June 2007, Retrieved 7.
  14. ↑ European Commission steps up efforts to put Europe’s memory on the Web via a “European Digital Library” Europa press release, 2 March 2006
  15. ↑ Pomerantz, Jeffrey, & Marchionini, Gary. "The Digital Library as Place," Journal of Documentation, 63(4), 2007, pp. 505-533.
  16. ↑ Gert, Janet. "Selection for Preservation in the Digital Age." Library Resources & Technical Services. 44(2) (2000):97-104.
  17. ↑ Ross, Seamus (2006), "Approaching Digital Preservation Holistically", in Moss, Michael; Currall, James, Information Management and Preservation, Oxford: Chandos Press, pp. 115–153, ISBN 1-84334-186-7
  18. ↑ Habibzadeh, P.; Sciences, Schattauer GmbH - Publishers for Medicine and Natural (2013-01-01). "Decay of References to Web sites in Articles Published in General Medical Journals: Mainstream vs Small Journals". Applied Clinical Informatics 4 (4). doi:10.4338/aci-2013-07-ra-0055.
  19. 1 2 Cain, Mark. “Managing Technology: Being a Library of Record in a Digital Age”, Journal of Academic Librarianship 29:6 (2003).
  20. ↑ Breeding, Marshall. “Preserving Digital Information.”. Information Today 19:5 (2002).
  21. ↑ Ltaper, Thomas H. "Where Next? Long-Term Considerations for Digital Initiatives." Kentucky Libraries 65(2)(2001):12-18.
  22. ↑ "Wider Net: About the e Granary".
  23. ↑ Van Le, Christopher, "Opening the Doors to Digital Libraries: A Proposal to Exempt Digital Libraries From the Copyright Act," Case Western Reserve Journal of Law, Technology & The Internet, 1.2 (Spring 2010),135.
  24. ↑ Pymm, Bob. "Building Collections for All Time: The Issue of Significance." Australian Academic & Research Libraries. 37(1) (2006):61-73.
  25. ↑ Antique Books
  26. ↑ Kelly, Kevin (2006-05-14). "Scan This Book!". New York Times Magazine. Retrieved 2008-03-07. When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. ... From the days of Sumerian clay tablets till now, humans have "published" at least 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 movies, 3 million videos, TV shows and short films and 100 billion public Web pages.
  27. ↑ Hirtle, Peter B.,"Digital Preservation and Copyright," Stanford University Libraries. Retrieved October 24, 2011.
  28. ↑ United States Copyright Office, "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 - U.S. Copyright Office Summary" 1998, 2.
  29. ↑ United States Copyright Office, "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 - U.S. Copyright Office Summary" 1998, 15.
  30. ↑ Van Le, Christopher, "Opening the Doors to Digital Libraries: A Proposal to Exempt Digital Libraries From the Copyright Act," Case Western Reserve Journal of Law, Technology & The Internet, 1.2 (Spring 2010),145.
  31. ↑ Stross, Randall (6 March 2013). "For Libraries and Publishers, an E-Book Tug of War". The New York Times.
  32. ↑ Tedd, Lucy A. & Large, Andrew (2005). Digital libraries: principles and practice in a global environment. Munchen: K.G.Saur.

Further reading

External links

Wikiversity has learning materials about Curriculum on Digital Libraries
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Digital library.
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