Digital Libraries: Principles and Practice in the Global Environment

Citation

Manzuch, Z. (2005), "Digital Libraries: Principles and Practice in the Global Environment", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 61 No. 4, pp. 555-557. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410510607525

The rapidly expanding field of digital libraries has been drawing increasing attention from researchers and LIS practitioners. The opportunities provided by information and communication technologies have made the digital library concept a buzzword in professional literature. A great variety of books and even entire journals are dedicated to diverse aspects of running, building, maintaining digital libraries. In a new book Digital Libraries: Principles and Practice in the Global Environment, Lucy A. Tedd and Andrew Large, authors of scholarly articles, courses and books on digital library‐related themes, provide an integrated approach to diverse themes covered by digital library “umbrella”. The authors introduce the digital library as a phenomenon that functions and develops itself in the complex social, technological, cultural, legal environment. The book is intended to provide an overview of changes and associated new practices brought by the rise of digital libraries, including broadened spectrum of services, access and management of digital information sources, digitization of cultural heritage, retrieval and discovery, interface design, management concerns of launching and running digital libraries. Having listed the opportunities of digital libraries, the authors do not overlook challenges, such as digital divide, language barriers, ICT illiteracy, issues of access to commercial databases of scholarly information, etc.

The book consists of nine chapters dedicated to diverse digital library themes. In the first chapter Digital Libraries in Context the authors provide an introduction into the concept of digital library, emphasizing its traditional “brick‐and mortar” library roots. The authors place digital libraries in the context of library development and provide parallels with dramatic changes in library practices that have already taken place due to invention of paper and printing. A digital library is one more stage in the library development that brings opportunities and challenges; offering new means of information organization, storage, access and delivery but builds on established library practices and standards. Having examined multiple approaches, Lucy Tedd and Andrew Large employ Christine Borgman's definition of a digital library that highlights three interrelated components: electronic resources, technological capabilities for information creation, search and use, and defined user community. Though the role of librarian is not emphasized in this definition, the authors note that skills of library and information professional are crucial to build and maintain digital libraries and this theme permeates all chapters of the book. This definition determines the further structure of the book. Chapter 2 Digital Libraries: Users and Services focuses on specific user communities, including scholars, students, communities united by common interests, age, etc., and roles of digital libraries in support of life‐long learning, research, knowledge development, promotion of cultural diversity. The scope and menu of digital library services are affected by the objectives and functions of the real world institution. In chapter 2, digital services and projects of national, public libraries, museums, archives, research and educational institutions are reviewed. The authors also draw the reader's attention to ICT offered enhanced functionalities of digital library services, such as personalization, real‐time and asynchronous reference services. However, despite all these advantages, users of digital libraries face significant access limitations (language, availability of technologies for access, disability, etc.) and information literacy requirements which are a pre‐requisite of a new stratification to information rich and poor. Tedd and Large go on discussing the main components of digital libraries in the chapter 3 Digital Information Sources. They do not claim to provide an exhaustive list of information sources and discuss some of them, considered to be typically available in the digital libraries. These include e‐journals, e‐books, e‐newspapers, theses and dissertations, archives, metadata sources, multimedia material and websites. With the development of electronic publishing, print material, especially scholarly, rapidly migrate to the digital environment. E‐publishing affects library acquisition and collection development. Nowadays libraries provide access to commercial scholarly information databases, but they do not possess the material. As creators of digital information, libraries enjoy the advantages of multimedia technologies that enable integration of various information types (e.g. sound, images, animation, video, text, etc.) and digitization. By digitizing their collections, libraries unlock their cultural assets to wide audience and create educational, national and local memory information packages.

Reviewing worldwide and European digitization initiatives, the authors speak about collaboration between libraries, museums and archives, or in other words, memory institutions. The theme of partnerships between these institutions appears in several chapters of the book. Digital collections and services of museums and archives are treated as digital libraries, though different metadata standards and interoperability issues pointed out in chapter 4 Standards and Interoperability prompts that in reality there are more differences between museum, library and archival practices. These are embedded in different nature of collection items, their description and presentation techniques. Collaboration of memory institutions is one of multiple aspects of digital library domain; therefore, readers interested in this topic are advised to search for additional literature. Chapter 4 provides a comprehensive overview of metadata standards, including MARC, Dublin Core, ISAD(G), EAD, TEI, RDF, METS, CIMI XML; introduces issues of character encoding, formats, markup languages; comments on digital object locators and protocols. These are vital concepts and themes for both students and practitioners dealing with the development of digital libraries. Chapter 5 Organizing Access to Digital Information Sources offers and overview of library/museum/archive and other information and document management software, complemented with concise description of commercial software products and links to manufacturer's websites. Additionally, the development of open source software and concrete examples with URLs are included. The chapter is completed by the discussion of key concepts of digital library architecture. Chapter 6 Interface design addresses issues of designing usable and attractive interfaces. The sphere of human‐computer interaction (HCI) is of growing concern to librarians who are involved into digital library development processes. The chapter outlines research performed in interface design, offers recommendations on some themes that are particularly relevant for digital libraries: interfaces for specific user communities (due to the limited scope of the book only two groups – young users and users with visual disabilities – are discussed), cultural and linguistic diversity impact to interface design. An overview provides reader with examples of relevant initiatives and links to research on offered topics. The concept of usability occasionally appears in text together with the notion “ease of use”. Having introduced these terms, the authors provide a good starting point for novices, intending to make a further research in professional HCI and interface design literature. Search and browsing facilities are vital issues for digital libraries and traditional domain in librarianship.

In chapter 7 Searching and Browsing authors provide an introduction into searching and browsing, discussing the use of Boolean logics, optimization of search by using options and fields offered by advanced search. This basic and generally known information is complemented by sections, covering issues of audio, video and image retrieval that are of particular concern to digital libraries, operating multimedia content. The authors conclude their panoramic overview of digital library themes by considering practical concerns for managers and case studies, complementing theoretical observations.

The main value of the book lies in its extensive coverage of the very complex and broad domain of digital libraries. The choice to summarize and overview wide variety of digital library topics is dictated by initial intention of authors “to provide a concise and easily digestible introduction to a range of international, digital library‐related developments”. Reader‐friendly text, multiple useful links, examples and illustrations indicate that authors reached their objective. The book is recommended for students and library practitioners aiming to acquire a good introduction into the field of digital libraries.