See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/44832678 Managing the digital library BOOK · JANUARY 2004 CITATIONS DOWNLOADS VIEWS 8 162 284 1 AUTHOR: Roy Tennant Online Computer Library Center 36 PUBLICATIONS 92 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Available from: Roy Tennant Retrieved on: 23 June 2015 Managing the Digital Library* Roy Tennant Acknowledgements Among those who have informed and/or influenced my thoughts on digital libraries, whether directly or unwittingly, include Howard Besser, Stephen Chapman, Steve Coffman, Walt Crawford, Thomas Dowling, Daniel Greenstein, Brian Kelly, Anne Kenney, Anne Lipow, Clifford Lynch, Eric Lease Morgan, Andrew K. Pace, Art Rhyno, Karen Schneider, and Stephen Sloan. Anyone privileged to know these people will realize the incredible variety of influences that these individuals represent. What that says about me I will leave to the imagination of the reader. Francine Fialkoff at Library Journal took a chance on me, for which I am grateful. First Norman Oder, and then Brian Kenney, labored to make my column both informative and readable — a formidable task to which they applied themselves with dedication and grace. A good editor will always make an author sound better than he or she really is, a fact you may wish to remember as you read this book. Of course, any remaining slips of the keyboard remain my own. * Author’s copy. Preface You would think that after six years of writing the “Digital Libraries” column for Library Journal I would have nothing left to say. But although I still have moments when I wonder where the next column will come from, in general I have no trouble finding new things to write about – or topics that have changed sufficiently to warrant another look. This is the nature of libraries today. What we learned yesterday is not necessarily going to be what we use today, and almost certainly not tomorrow. If you take anything away from reading this book, make it that – that the only constant is change, and those who can foster and shape change will lead us into the future. If you are such a person, it is to you that I have been writing, every month for six years. In fact, it is mostly through my desire to make whatever small contribution I can to the ongoing self-education of library staff (myself included) that keeps me writing today. Well, that and the money. This book contains every Library Journal “Digital Libraries” column from the beginning in November 1997 through October 2003, the due date of this manuscript. But in creating this compilation, each column was edited, link checked, rewritten if needed (sometimes substantially), and new content added. For a complete accounting of when each column ran, and in which book chapter you will find the updated version, see Appendices A and B. Note that not all columns will stand the test of time well, but I thought that even those that didn’t would provide a historical perspective on digital library development that may prove useful. When the column began, I can remember writing with my PowerBook 145 balanced on my knees while making sure my four-year-old twins didn’t drown in their bath. The following years weren’t much different. Some columns were written on the road while traveling (e.g., “Reality Check: Shanghai Surprise”), while most others were cobbled together in snippets of time around other obligations. Even now, I’m writing on my PowerBook G4 while waiting in the car to pick up my kids from drama rehearsal. I’m telling you this only as an illustration of what the life of nearly all modern professionals must surely be like. My full-time job does not provide me with enough time to keep up, to be engaged professionally, and certainly not to write. I doubt your job is any different. The point is that the time to do these things is never handed to you on a plate. You must get up and grasp it. You must do it because it needs doing and it’s important. You must do it because you’re the only one who can. I firmly believe that to build practical, effective digital library collections and services requires more than a few technical cognoscenti. It requires more than large government grants awarded to a handful of top research universities. It takes many individual librarians with a scanner and good intentions. It takes librarians with imagination and the guts to do something about it. It will, in the end, take us all. Here’s hoping that six years of columns will help, in some small measure, to get us all where we need to go. Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. Acquisition & Digitization Chapter 3. Building Collections Chapter 4. Cataloging & Classification Chapter 5. Access Chapter 6. Public Service Chapter 7. Organization & Staffing Chapter 8. Technology & Infrastructure Chapter 9. Standards & Interoperability Chapter 10. Case Studies Chapter 11. Copyright & Intellectual Property Rights Chapter 12. Preservation Chapter 13. Current Awareness Appendix A. “Digital Libraries” Columns by Date Appendix B. “Digital Libraries” Columns by Title Chapter 1: Introduction Digital Potential and Pitfalls The Grand Challenges The Banal Barriers The Digital Library Divide The Digital Library Foundation Digital Potential and Pitfalls With the influx of millions of dollars in grant funds and a fast-growing awareness of the potential of digital technologies to transform access to information, digital library hype has outrun reality. Scenarios of digital library futures sometimes imply that nirvana will have been reached by the early 21st century, wherein the whole of recorded knowledge (or at least enough for most people) will be no further away than the nearest Internet-connected computer. Therefore I feel compelled to break my rule against predicting the future (an exercise best left to fools and geniuses) and assert: • only a very small fraction of the millions of print items currently held by the world’s libraries will ever be in digital form; • digital library collections and services enhance traditional libraries, they don’t replace them; and, • the need for services provided by real libraries and those who staff them will grow, not disappear. Yes, we still need real libraries and skilled people to staff them. But what those staff will be doing will be different, sometimes very different, from what they do today. This is not a prediction but a dead certainty. How many reference librarians can completely ignore online databases, CD-ROM databases, and the web and still do their job? Not many can, or should. But think back 20 years. Most reference librarians performed their jobs just fine without the very things that are now essential to adequate service. The game has changed. How the game is changing is at the core of this book, and the magazine column upon which it is based. Those who build digital libraries are helping to change the rules and by so doing forge a framework that will take libraries well into this century. However, among the techniques, technologies, and draft standards that will serve as the foundation for these new libraries are research projects that will go nowhere, technologies that will never be adopted, and new paradigms that are a dime short. I will try to steer you through the mess and highlight what should be on your horizon: projects and people to watch, technologies to learn about, and how to keep current. Defining the digital library There are almost as many definitions of “digital library” as there are projects using the term, but the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), in its “Definitions and Purposes of a Digital Library,” has defined a digital library as having these qualities: • The digital library is not a single entity; • The digital library requires technology to link the resources of many; • The linkages between the many digital libraries and information services are transparent to the end user; • Universal access to digital libraries and information services is a goal; • Digital library collections are not limited to document surrogates: they extend to digital artifacts that cannot be represented or distributed in printed formats. ARL’s broad definition of a digital library leaves a great deal of room for diversity, which is reflected in projects by the Library of Congress, the University of Virginia, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and many others. The Digital Library Federation defines digital libraries as “organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities.” Within the United States certainly, and to some degree abroad as well, the multi-million $USD made available by the National Science Foundation to support research in the area of digital libraries beginning in 1994 was pivotal in bringing the spotlight to bear on this issue. Prior to the initial call for research proposals, libraries mainly discussed this issue as being one of “electronic libraries” in a typically inclusive style. That is, the term “electronic library” encompassed information available in electronic analog, as well as digital, form, such as early videodiscs. However, the announcement of the NSF Digital Library Initiative was the death knell of the term “electronic library,” as ever since the term “digital library” has held sway – at least in the United States. The initial awardees of the NSF Digital Libraries Iniatitive One (DLI1) were as follows: Carnegie Mellon, to create a multimedia library consisting of video, audio, images, and text. The research was to involve speech recognition, image understanding, and natural language support.