Digital Libraries

Policy, Planning and Practice

Judith Andrews, Derek Law, Derek Law

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351944052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Digital Libraries: Policy, Planning and Practice brings together a wealth of international experience in the planning and implementation of digital and hybrid library projects, providing a stimulating and informative handbook and reference for library staff and information managers. It consists of chapters contributed by leading specialists from Europe, North America, South Africa and the Middle East, who offer their insight into the decision-making processes that have shaped a variety of different digitization programmes. Beginning with introductory overviews of the digital library context, the US Digital Library Program and the UK e-lib and hybrid library programmes, Digital Libraries then divides into two main sections on policy and planning, and implementation and practice. The first explores concerns such as financial and resource planning, digitized compared to born-digital content and related service issues, open access to scholarly research archives, policies for and against preservation and their justification, and evaluating electronic information services. The second section is based on case studies on major European and North American digital library projects, including the Glasgow Digital Library, UCEEL (University of Central England Electronic Library), the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (discussed in the context of five international projects), the Indiana University music Variations and Variations2 Project, and the beginnings of the Library of Congress digital program and its integration into core library services. The concluding chapter discusses the way forward for digital libraries in the context of experiences at Tilburg University library, and possible enabling or limiting factors in the future. The result of drawing together these varied and illuminating experiences is a book that offers useful information and comparisons for all digital library project staff, institutional administrators, educators and developers of learning technology. It also provides useful pointers for researchers and project staff involved in archive and museum projects, as well as introducing students to the key ingredients of successful digital libraries.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Judith Andrews and Derek Law

 

 

 

This book aims to provide a snapshot of digital library development, highlighting issues of policy and practice in a wide range of related areas, and attempts to show how research has been developed for application in the workplace. The pace of development described in the following chapters clearly illustrates that the issues and challenges facing digital library developers change at a staggering pace. The value of this book is that it provides an overview of how we have arrived at the current position, a consideration of key policy issues that need to be addressed, an insight into the decision-making process of those who are working at ‘the coal face’ and a vision of future directions.

In his chapter about the development of the Glasgow Digital Library, Alan Dawson states that ‘It is not a typical digital library, but there is probably no such thing’. The examples of digital library implementations explored in this book illustrate the truth of this comment. Digital libraries are a common issue throughout the world, yet thrive on a diversity of culture, history and professional practice. With 23 authors from five countries on three continents, this book reflects that fact. As a result, a decision has been taken to allow the authors to speak in their own voice. Therefore, the editors have not harmonized spelling (program and programme), library practice (library patron or library user) or words (fall and autumn).

Chapters 2 and 3 present valuable overviews of the eLib and the digital library research programmes that were established in the UK and US respectively. The projects undertaken under the auspices of these programmes have had a fundamental impact on the development of the digital libraries we see today. In Chapter 2, William H. Mischo provides an overview of federally sponsored digital library research projects and programmes. He also considers the developments achieved by two specific projects at Stanford University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In Chapter 3, Stephen Pinfield draws on the literature about eLib and on his personal experiences of working on the programme to analyse some of its successes and failures. He also highlights some of the key differences between eLib and the US digital library programmes.

Part 1 contains chapters that explore five key digital library policy areas economics, content, scholarly communication, preservation and evaluation. Mike Lesk, in Chapter 4, considers the economics of digital libraries and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a range of potential funding mechanisms. These mechanisms include the current model (funding by the community) through to funding by authors, by user subscriptions, via advertising and a number of other potential funding routes. The fifth chapter, by Derek Law, explores the different types of content used to create digital libraries, from born digital material tolicensed leased journals. In Chapter 6, Stevan Harnad gives a comprehensive description of how open access works or can be made to work to create a global virtual archive of scholarly research. He began as a somewhat solitary voice in the wilderness but his views have been increasingly adopted by the mainstream of thought on scholarly communication. Notably, he provides a series of FAQs and answers that demolish the arguments against progress. This chapter differs from the rest in that it was not specifically written for the book but has been a living document, developed on-line through collaborative debate and comment, on the web for many months. However, the topic is so relevant to the future of digital libraries that we are delighted that Stevan has agreed to its inclusion here, although the audience he addresses is more that of researchers than librarians. Susan S. Lazinger, in Chapter 7, uses a series of questions to consider issues of policy and practice in digital preservation. The questions include why digital resources should be preserved, what should be preserved, who the stakeholders are and what their responsibilities should be, and how digital resources should be preserved bearing in mind a wide range of technical issues. The final question relates to the complexities of establishing the true costs of digital preservation. In Chapter 8, Pete Dalton, Stella Thebridge and Rebecca Hartland-Fox examine the role of evaluation in relation to electronic information services (EIS). They stress the importance of the role that evaluation should play in the effective management of EIS and provide an overview of the benefits it can bring. The current challenges to effective evaluation are identified and a number of important tools and projects in the field are discussed.

The digital library implementations that are described in Part 2 are very different in nature. They are a metropolitan digital library (Glasgow Digital Library), a single university digital library striving to develop multiple collections with a range of different formats (UCEEL), a single subject digital library that is expanding to include other pilot sites (Variations2), a national/international digital library focusing on one type of publication (National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations) and a national library of international repute with a wealth of special collections (Library of Congress).

Despite the fundamental differences in mission, many of the chapters in Section 2 highlight a range of common issues, for example metadata, technical standards, authentication, preservation and evaluation. What becomes clear is that there is no single solution to the challenges that digital library developers face in each of these key areas. It is intended that the different approaches described will provide a wide-ranging overview of the issues to be addressed, the solutions that have been adopted and the reasons why these crucial decisions have been made.

Chapters 9 and 10 describe implementations of digital libraries in the UK, the Glasgow Digital Library (GDL) and UCEEL, a digital library being developed at the University of Central England.

Alan Dawson, in Chapter 9, uses the 16 headings identified in Chowdhury & Chowdhury’s (1999) classic work on digital library research to describe the development of the GDL. Under each heading is a commentary on issues and problems that were actually encountered in trying to create a digital library, as well as details of any solutions found and lessons learned. There is also a rating of the importance of each heading for the GDL, on a scale from 1 to 5 (1 = not important,5 = extremely important), and an assessment of the percentage of implementation time spent on matters relating to that heading. A practical overview of the development of UCEEL is provided by Chris Dodd and Judith Andrews in Chapter 10. Like the previous chapter, this description also explores the challenges faced and the reasons for the solutions that were adopted. The final part of the chapter highlights plans for further development of the system.

In Chapter 11, Edward A. Fox, Gail McMillan, Hussein Suleman, Marcos A. Gonçalves and Ming Luo describe the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). The NDLTD’s goals, objectives, content, management and access are discussed, as well as evaluation, preservation and intellectual property rights. The growing interest in electronic theses and dissertations (EDTs) is discussed and illustrated by an overview of five international projects in the US, Germany, Australia, India and Brazil. The final section of the chapter sets out plans for future developments.

The development of the Variations and Variations2 digital music library projects at Indiana University is reviewed by Jon W. Dunn, Mary Wallace Davidson, Jan R. Holloway and Gerald Bernbom in Chapter 12. In addition, possible future directions are discussed in the context of today’s concerns in music research and instruction. Diane Kresh, in Chapter 13, describes the beginnings of the Library of Congress digital program, its integration into core library services, and what the future may hold for the provision of web-based information services.

The final chapter, by Mel Collier, discusses a potential way forward for digital libraries in the context of Tilburg University library. The chapter considers the steps on the way to the development of the first digital libraries, and argues that a fundamental boundary has now been crossed in that it is now possible to create a totally digital library. The second part of the chapter looks to the future and discusses possible enabling factors, future stakeholders and potential barriers. In conclusion, we wish to thank all the contributors to this book. The opinions are theirs, any errors are ours!

Reference

Chowdhury, G.G. and Chowdhury, S. (1999) ‘Digital Library Research: Major Issues and Trends’, Journal of Documentation, 55 (4), 409–448.

Chapter 2
United States Federal Support for Digital Library Research and its Implications for Digital Library Development

William H. Mischo

Introduction

The United States federal government began formal financial support for digital library research in 1994, with the funding of six projects under the auspices of the federated Digital Library Initiative (now called DLI-1) program. These DLI-1 research and development projects were jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The support for the DLI-1 program initially came out of the United States federal government’s High Performance Computing and Communications Program (HPCC) and grew out of a community-based series of workshops sponsored by the NSF in 1993–94 (Griffin, 1998).

The six DLI-1 projects were awarded a total of $24 million in federal funding over the four-year lives of the projects. In 1998, at the cessation of the DLI-1 program, federal funding for the DLI-2 program was begun with support from the NSF, NASA, DARPA, the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Library of Congress (LC), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). In total, between 1994 and 1999, a total of $68 million in federal research grants was awarded under DLI-1 and DLI-2 (Fox, 1999).

In addition, in 1998, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), under DARPA support, began the three-year D-Lib Test Suite program, which provided continuing funding for several of the digital library Testbeds created under DLI-1.

The above programs have also been greatly augmented by projects funded under the NSF-sponsored National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Digital Library (NSDL) program and the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) research programs.

When work on the DLI-1 projects began in 1994, the World Wide Web (WWW) was in a nascent stage. At that time, the University of Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Mosaic 2.0 beta was the web browser of choice, the HTML 2.0 standard was still under development, Netscape had yet to release its first web browser and Microsoft Windows 3.1 was the standard personal computer operating system. Computer and networking technology has changed dramatically over the last ten years and nowhere is this more evident than in the rapidly evolving world of digital library research and implementation. While federally funded digital library research has made some important inroads, it has also occasionally found itself outside the mainstream of a rapidly evolving technology environment.

This review will not attempt to survey and document exhaustively all the federally-sponsored research projects and research programs, but rather will provide an overview of the programs and a more-detailed examination of two DLI-1 projects. This review will also suggest key areas of interest for the development and implementation of digital libraries. Some of these areas have been addressed by federally funded digital library research and some have, at the present, not been addressed.

There is a prolific literature surrounding the definition of a ‘digital library’ and the distinctions between digital, electronic, and virtual libraries (Chowdhury and Chowdhury, 1999). This paper will utilize the vocabulary suggested by the NSDL program in which digital libraries are described as

A managed environment of multimedia materials in digital form, designed for the benefit of its user population, structured to facilitate access to its contents, and equipped with aids to navigate the global network … with users and holdings totally distributed, but managed as a coherent whole

Alternatively, a 1997 Santa Fe Workshop on digital libraries characterized the digital library as an environment to bring together collections, services, and people in a full life cycle of creation, dissemination, use and preservation activities.

The DLI-1 Projects

Under DLI-1, six university-led consortia were funded to develop and apply robust computing and networking capabilities to make large distributed electronic collections accessible, interoperable, and usable. Each project utilized multi-departmental teams together with commercial vendors or software companies to push the envelope of digital library research. The six funded institutions and their primary focus were:

●The University of Michigan for research on agent technology and mechanisms for improving secondary education.

●Stanford University for the investigation of interoperability among heterogeneous digital libraries and the exploration of distributed object technology.

●The University of California-Berkeley for imaging technologies, government environmental information resources, and database technologies.

●The University of California-Santa Barbara for the Alexandria Project to develop GIS (Geograph...