Digital Libraries

ONeDL : Open Network of Digital Libraries

Digital Libraries are virtual spaces that mediate access ,use and generation of knowledge.

The Corporation of Universities for the Development of Internet in Mexico (CUDI) promotes the development of digital libraries. The Open Network of Digital Libraries (ONeDL, or "RABiD" after its initials in Spanish) integrates and consolidates efforts of CUDI members to promote federated access to their collections and services. Software and standards will be produced in order to facilitate the inclusion of more Digital Libraries into ONeDL.

This network will take advantage of ongoing developments at each of its member institutions.

This is an open network so new members will be added to this list.

Through its Mexico City Center, the Libraries of Texas A&M University make their aerial scanning equipment available to all network members interested in digitizing ancient books and archives.

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European Conference on Digital Libraries

The European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology on Digital Libraries (ECDL) started in 1997 in conjunction with the activities of the first DELOS Working Group. The Working Group, partially funded by the European Union, laid the foundations for the establishment of a European Research Community on Digital Libraries. ECDL has become a notable European forum focusing on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues, meeting the needs of a large and diverse constituency, which includes practitioners, researchers, educators, policy makers and users.

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Analytical sciences digital library

The Analytical Sciences Digital Library (ASDL) was founded in 2001 as one of several digital libraries in the National Science Digital Library, funded by the National Science Foundation. The library is a collection of peer-reviewed electronic resources on chemical measurements and instrumentation. The collection also contains materials on active learning and its use for effective instruction in the analytical sciences. The resources in ASDL are freely available and widely used by students, teachers and practitioners of analytical chemistry and its application areas. The site includes a collection of annotated electronic resources catalogued with the Open Archive Initiative and Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, making the collection searchable by any other group that uses these definitions.

Since 2004, the Journal of the Analytical Sciences Digital Library, JASDL, has published peer-reviewed online articles in the categories of courseware, labware, educational practices, undergraduate research, and poster sessions. The site is an open source site, and therefore publication is under the Creative Commons license. As a result authors retain copyright privileges and are free to publish their work elsewhere. This allows for a wider variety of published works to be available freely to the scientific community.

The ASDL community of users can participate in activities that promote analytical chemistry and help advance the education and training of future members of the analytical chemistry community by submitting and viewing posters for the ASDL online poster session, posting your information in the Analytical Sciences Professional Directory, contributing a url for consideration for the web collection, writing a JASDL article on an innovative aspect of your teaching or research with undergraduates or by volunteering to review new ASDL materials.

In 2007 ASDL partnered with the Analytical Division of the American Chemical Society to broaden their ability to serve as a connection place online for the analytical sciences community.

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World Digital Library

The World Digital Library is a project of the Library of Congress to make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and contribute to scholarly research.

Google Inc. became the first partner of this public-private partnership and in 2005 donated $3 million to support development of the World Digital Library.

At the National Commission’s 2006 annual conference, Dr. John Van Oudenaren, Senior Advisor for the World Digital Library at the Library of Congress, outlined a project plan for bringing Dr. Billington’s vision to fruition. Foremost was the belief that the World Digital Library should engage partners in planning the four main projects areas: technical architecture, selection, governance, and funding. This was achieved in December 2006, when 45 national library directors, library technical directors, and cultural and educational representatives from UNESCO met in Paris to discuss the development of the World Digital Library. The participants formed working groups to address the special challenges of each of the four project areas.

The planning process continues. The working groups met in the first half of 2007 and included professionals in the field of digital libraries – including but not limited to computer science, library and information science, Web development, and fundraising. The working groups presented their findings to the larger WDL group in July 2007. Findings from this planning process were presented at the 34th session of the UNESCO General Conference in October 2007 in Paris, France.

In early September 2008 the Organization of American States (OAS) agreed to join with the Library of Congress in developing the World Digital Library. Secretary General José Miguel Insulza signed the “Contributor Agreement” with Librarian of Congress, Dr. James Billington, at an OAS headquarters ceremony.

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Digital library

A digital library is a library in which collections are stored in digital formats (as opposed to print, microform, or other media) and accessible by computers. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. A digital library is a type of information retrieval system.

An organization, which might be virtual, that comprehensively collects, manages and preserves for the long term rich digital content, and offers to its user communities specialized functionality on that content, of measurable quality and according to codified policies.

The first use of the term digital library in print may have been in a 1988 report to the Corporation for National Research Initiatives The term digital libraries was first popularized by the NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative in 1994. The older names electronic library or virtual library are also occasionally used, though electronic library nowadays more often refers to portals, often provided by government agencies.

The term digital library is diffuse enough to be applied to a wide range of collections and organizations, but, to be considered a digital library, an online collection of information must be managed by and made accessible to a community of users. Thus, some web sites can be considered digital libraries, but far from all. Many of the best known digital libraries are older than the web including Project Perseus, Project Gutenberg, and ibiblio. Nevertheless, as a result of the development of the internet and its search potential, digital libraries such as the European Library and the Library of Congress are now developing in a Web-based environment. Public, school and college libraries are also able to develop digital download websites, featuring eBooks, audiobooks, music and video.

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, by digitizing. The term hybrid library is sometimes used for libraries that have both physical collections and digital collections. For example, American Memory is a digital library within the Library of Congress. Some important digital libraries also serve as long term archives, for example, the ePrint arXiv, and the Internet Archive.

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.

The technology used to create digital libraries has been even more revolutionary for archives since it breaks down the second and third of these general rules. The Oxford Text Archive is generally considered to be the oldest digital archive of academic physical primary source materials.

Project Gutenberg, Google Book Search, Windows Live Search Books(shutdown), Internet Archive, Cornell University, The Library of Congress World Digital Library, The Digital Library at the University of Michigan, and Carnegie Mellon University's Million Book Project are considered leaders in the field of digital library creation and management.

Large scale digitization projects are underway at Google, the Million Book Project, MSN, and Yahoo!. With continued improvements in book handling and presentation technologies such as optical character recognition and ebooks, and development of alternative depositories and business models, digital libraries are rapidly growing in popularity as demonstrated by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN's efforts. Just as libraries have ventured into audio and video collections, so have digital libraries such as the Internet Archive.

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, Google, Yahoo! and Scirus can also use OAI-PMH to find these deep web resources.

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, 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.

See also Digital Collections Selection Criteria.

A digital library can be built around specific repository software. The best known examples of this are DSpace, Eprints, Fedora, dLibra(Poland), and Greenstone Digital Library Software.

The Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) provides a framework to address Digital preservation.

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 plan the digitization of millions of books per year for creating digital libraries.

See also Digitizing#Collaborative digitization projects.

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.

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. As such, the cost of maintaining a digital library is much lower than that of a traditional library.

A traditional library must spend large sums of money paying for staff, book maintenance, rent, and additional books. Digital libraries do away with these fees. Both types of library require cataloguing 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; convetional libraries may consider that providing online access to their OPAC catalogue is sufficient. An important advantage to digital conversion is increased accessibility to users. There in also availability to individuals who may not be traditional patrons of a library, due to geographic location or organizational affiliation.

The work needed to ensure that digital content is maintained and accessible into the future is beginning to be addressed: see digital preservation.

Technological standards change over time and forward migration must be a constant consideration of every library. Migration is a means of transferring an unstable digital object to another more stable format, operating system, or programming language. Migration allows the ability to retrieve and display digital objects that are in danger of becoming extinct. This is a rather successful short-term solution for the problem of aging and obsolete digital formats, but with the ever-changing nature of computer technologies, migration becomes this never-ending race to transfer digital objects to new and more stable formats. Migration is also flawed in the sense that when the digital files are being transferred, the new platform may not be able to capture the full integrity of the original object. There are countless artifacts sitting in libraries all over the world that are essentially useless because the technology required to access the source is obsolete. In addition to obsolescence, there are rising costs that result from continually replacing the older technologies. This issue can dominate preservation policy and may put more focus on instant user access in place of physical preservation.

Some people have criticized that digital libraries are hampered by copyright law, because works cannot be shared over different periods of time in the manner of a traditional library. The republication of material on the Web by libraries may require permission from rights holders, and there is a conflict of interest between them and publishers who may wish to create Web versions of their content for commercial purposes.

There is a dilution of responsibility that occurs as a result of the spread-out nature of digital resources. Complex intellectual property matters may become involved since digital material isn't always owned by a library. 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 2000BC to 1960, has been made.

Other digital libraries accommodate copyright concerns by licensing content and distributing it on a commercial basis, which allows for better management of the content's reproduction and the payment (if required) of royalties. The Fair Use Provisions (17 USC § 107) under copyright law provide specific guidelines under which circumstances libraries are allowed to copy digital resources. Four factors that constitute fair use are purpose of use, nature of the work, market impact, and amount or substantiality used.

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