Digital Libraries
[as always, avoid those cookies!!!]
Philip Doty

The concept of the digital library (DL) is relatively new, no more than a decade old, and it has a number of terminological problems. As discussed throughout the course, however, terminological differences and conflict are inevitable: not just because we are dealing with technologies, concepts, and terms that often quickly go out of date, but also because such wrangling is endemic to the project of being a scholar. What is clear, however, is that the concept of the digital library has captured the imagination of researchers, practitioners, governmental policy makers, organizational leaders, the media, and the public. Several disciplines consider themselves expert in the matter of digital libraries, and that is one of the strengths and weaknesses of the "field."

The dream of a universal library has been with us in the Western tradition for centuries if not longer. The papers in Bloch & Hesse (1993) and H.G. Wells' World Brain give an indication of this tradition. Further examples are the work of the encyclopedists of the 18th century and the founders of what we now call hypertext and the Web, e.g., the Belgian Paul Otlet in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fictional literature also features this concept, and Borges (1964) gives us the slightly guilty thrill of a beautiful dystopian vision of the universal library.

The growth of computing and telecommunications, and their generally recognized convergence, has renewed belief in some quarters that the universal library is both possible and desirable. Others take a more sanguine and realistic view of both the promise and weaknesses of digital technologies and the social structures they help create and erode. Of course, organizational researchers of all kinds have been investigating what information and communication technologies mean for all kinds of enterprises, and much of their work is of interest with regard to digital libraries. Two of the best and most useful sources from this literature remain Sproull & Kiesler (1991), especially their discussion of first- and second-level effects of information technologies, and Zuboff (1988).

A basic question we can ask is whether the digital library is a library at all (Miksa & Doty, 1994). That question leads naturally enough to considering the lack of clarity about what the term "digital library" means. Borgman (2000, p. 35) makes a useful distinction between how researchers see digital libraries - as technologies and files - and how librarians focus on DLs as services or institutions. But Borgman goes on to demonstrate that even this distinction can be teased apart - computer science researchers put their attention on the technologies that allow DLs to operate, scholars in information studies focus on users' behavior, organizations, materials, and dissemination. Scholars in sociology focus on social contexts, in economics, on economic models; and so on. Topics such as interface design and human-computer interaction (HCI) cross these and other disciplinary boundaries (p. 36).

A primary distinction can be made between the concepts of digital libraries held in information studies with those held in computer science. Information studies take a very general, socially situated view of libraries as institutions, emphasizing access by a community of users. Other disciplines, especially computer science and telecommunications, see libraries as collections of databases. The divisions among these disciplines, however, are constantly crossed, especially in the context of major meetings such as the ACM Digital Library conferences (http://www.acm.org/dl/), which continue the 1994 Conference on DLs at Texas A&M (http://csdl.tamu.edu/DL94/) and the 1995 Conference at UT-Austin (http://csdl.tamu.edu/DL95/).

One of the most important documents on digital libraries is Lesk, Fox, & McGill (1991), but that and other important, governmental documents do not define the term "digital library" explicitly. Among the major difficulties is the lack of clear focus about precisely what it is that a digital library is and does. Doty & Erdelez (1999, p. 154) remind us that "multiple disciplines define digital libraries differently, and, often, there is conflict within disciplines about what the term 'digital libraries' means." Here are some illustrative definitions:

• "Digital libraries are organized collections of digital information" (Lesk, 1997, xix).
  
  
• "Digital libraries are distributed, multimedia-based collections that provide specified services under some personal or institutional auspices" (Doty & Erdelez, 1999, p. 154).
  
  
• Digital libraries are characterized by three elements: an organized collection that can be both digital and paper, full-text material not just surrogates, and a commitment to serving some audience(s) (Bishop & Star, 1996).
  
  
• Digital libraries are "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" (Digital Library Federation, http://www.clir.org/diglib/dlfhomepage.htm).

Borgman (2000, p. 42, citing Borgman et al., 1996) provides a useful, comprehensive definition:

Digital libraries are a set of electronic resources and associated technical capacities for creating, searching, and using information. . . . Digital libraries are constructed - collected and organized - by [and for] a community of users, and their functional capacities support the information needs and uses of that community.

An important distinction to remember is that the terms "digital" and "digitized" are not equivalent. "Digitized" means that the information has been converted from print/graphic/audio analog form to digital form. "Digital" can apply equally to material born digital or converted from analog to digital.

Other important terms in digital library research, as well as in digital systems research generally, are usability, cognitive authority (Wilson, 1983), metadata, preservation (Rothenberg, 1995 and 1997), and relevance (in the context of information retrieval). The interested reader is encouraged to follow their trail as interests dictate. Some of these terms, and related concepts, will be addressed elsewhere in the course.

Significant, summative views of digital libraries are Arms (2000) and Lesk (1997). While Lesk's book is especially accessible, it unfortunately takes too limited a view of the problems raised by public policy and communities of practice that surround digital libraries. He too summarily dismisses them as economic. A great strength of his book, ironically, is its insistence that digital libraries are, in fact, social institutions that demand social structures to support them and their users. Of particular value are several reminders he gives us, eroding our confidence in some facile assumptions that we too easily embrace:

• If libraries go from just-in-case to just-in-time collection development (from being repositories to being gateways to information), it may be just as expensive or more expensive to be in business.
  
  
• Even though physical deterioration of physical media is a significant problem in digital libraries, a greater problem may prove to be technological obsolescence.
  
  
• We cannot assume that our field's embrace of the shared funding model of the library can survive in a world increasingly digital (p. 198).
  
  
• It is not enough to read - a successful digital library encourages creation and wider contribution to the public conversation.

This last point is widely discussed and should make us more careful about our belief that giving people "access" is sufficient. One of the forms this discussion takes is in trying to ascertain what upstream capabilities communication media should have because such capabilities determine how active a contributor the ordinary citizen can be. The mass media are good models of purely downstream models, and they have been highly criticized for making us passive consumers rather than encouraging us to be active creators of cultural expression.

Lesk (1997) and Borgman (2000) do a very good job of presenting useful, encapsulated histories of the development of digital libraries in the U.S. - but they are especially good at putting these developments into an international context. Further, they both provide valuable descriptions of the U.S. Federally-funded Digital Library Initiatives (DLI) Phases I and II.

Phase I (http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/dlione/) lasted from 1994-1998 and was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Department of Energy (DoE).

Phase II (http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/) is scheduled to last from 1999-2004, and involves NSF and NASA again, but has been expanded to include the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the Library of Congress (LC), the Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The Smithsonian Institution and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) are also partners in DLI II.

Here in central Texas, we have a very valuable resource at our sister public university in College Station: the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL) at Texas A&M University (http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/). Here are two brief descriptions, lifted from their Web site, of two digital library research projects they currently support:

The CSDL is working with Professor Eduardo Urbina of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages on the Cervantes Project 2001 (http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes/english/index.html). Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) is the creator of the modern novel in Don Quijote de la Mancha, and his works are the cornerstone of Hispanic culture and literature. The Cervantes Project 2001, working in cooperation with the Centro de Estudios Cervantinos in Spain, has the following goals:

1. developing a comprehensive digital library of Cervantes' complete works in electronic form



2. creating a digital archive of related photographic images for teaching and research;
   
   
3. developing and publishing on the Web, with the assistance of an international team of collaborators, the Cervantes International Bibliography Online, the first comprehensive bibliography of Cervantes' studies, going back to 1900
   
   
4. developing computer tools, display interfaces, and user's methodology that can be employed by similar projects in the Humanities.

The CSDL is a participating member in the Flora of Texas Consortium (http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/FLORA/ftc/ftchome.htm). The goal of this project is to create a digital library containing approximately 6,000 taxa of native and naturalized vascular plants of Texas accessible via the Internet. These materials will be widely used in support of floristics, plant community studies, regional biotic histories and synonymies, distribution maps, and to provide access to illustrations and images of the flora of Texas. This project is being developed in conjunction with Professor Hugh Wilson of the Biology Department and Professor Steven Hatch of the Rangeland Ecology and Management Department.

The Flora of Texas Consortium exemplifies the concept of a specialized digital reference collection that attempts to provide an authoritative source of information supplied by experts in a particular field. In a different field, the Pediatric Interactive Digital Library (http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/peds/pidl/) of Vanderbilt University also exemplifies this concept. Still another example is the Astronomy Digital Image Library (http://imagelib.ncsa.uiuc.edu/) of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. An interesting example of something akin to this kind of digital library is the amateur-maintained (here "amateur" is used in its original meaning of "enthusiast for, or lover of, a subject") site, Richard Wagner Web Site (http://home.no.net/wagner/). (A wonderful thing about the World-Wide Web is that enthusiasts can, and do, establish and maintain Websites on an incredible variety of topics. A perilous thing about the Web is that the information on some of these Websites may fail to be accurate.) Music resources are the subject of an essay, Creating the Digital Alexandria (http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/00/00-01hart-speech.html) by Mickey Hart, a member of The Grateful Dead, which sketches some of the possibilities and problems of collections of digitized music, and the essay is itself part of a digital archive maintained as a public service by the Commonwealth Club of California (http://www.commonwealthclub.org/about.html).

Here are some of my favorite digital libraries, whether they call themselves that or not:

• The Perseus Project at Tufts University http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
  
  
• The American Memory initiative at the Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/
  
  
• SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research http://www.sabr.org/
  
  
• The California Digital Library http://www.cdlib.org/
  
  
• The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University http://www.law.cornell.edu/

A bit closer to home, here are two Texas digital libraries that I find very useful and that you might enjoy exploring:

• The Texas Digital Library Alliance http://www.lib.utexas.edu/tdla/index.html
  
• The UT-Austin General Libraries government information site http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/Government.html

Notes (added by R. E. Wyllys):

Two recent issues of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS) were devoted to the topic of Digital Libraries and contain articles that are well worth your reading. The issues are

Chen, Hsinchun. (Ed.) (2000). Special Topic Issue: Digital Libraries: Part 1. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(3), 213-310.

Chen, Hsinchun. (Ed.) (2000). Special Topic Issue: Digital Libraries: Part 2. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(4), 311-413.

(JASIS is now JASIST, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.)

A provocative article by Terry Brooks (who earned his Ph.D. from the UT-Austin School of Information in 1981) suggests that in the future many of the functions of professional journals, like those of libraries, may be performed by online equivalents:

Brooks, Terrence A. (1999). Postmodern Information Science and its "Journal". Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 50(11), 1030-1031.

Dr. Brooks's Website makes available a copy of this article, http://faculty.washington.edu/tabrooks/Documents/postmodern.html, with some added comments. The article is part of a special topic issue of JASIS that was devoted to "The Journal, Its Society, and the Future of Print." The issue, edited by Marcia J. Bates, contains several other articles touching on aspects of digital libraries.

An interesting paper on the interface problem in digital libraries is

Bates, Marcia J. (2002). The Cascade of Interactions in the Digital Library Interface. Information Processing and Management, 38, 381-400. Retrieved October 8, 2002, from http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/cascade.html

Sources

Arms, William Y. (2000). Digital libraries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bishop, Ann P., & Star, Susan Leigh. (1996). Social informatics of digital library use and infrastructure. In Martha Williams (Ed.), Annual review of information science and technology (vol. 31) (pp. 301-401). Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Bloch, R. Howard, & Hesse, Carla. (Eds.). (1993). Future libraries. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Borges, Jorge Luis. (1964). The library of Babel. In Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby (Eds.), Labyrinths: Selected stories & other writings (pp. 51-58). (Translated by James E. Irby.). NY: New Directions Paperback.

Borgman, Christine L. (2000). From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to information in the networked world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bush, Vannevar. (1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, 176(1), 101-108. Also available http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm

Digital Library Initiative Phase I. http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/dlione/

Digital Library Initiative Phase II. http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/

Doty, Philip, & Erdelez, Sanda. (1999). A digital library of legal case documents: The District Electronic Case Library (DECAL). In Tatjana Aparac, Tefko Saracevic, Peter Ingwersen, & Pertti Vakkari (Eds.), Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (pp. 153-164). Zagreb, Croatia: Naklada Benja.

Lesk, Michael. (1997). Practical digital libraries: Books, bytes, and bucks. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

Lesk, Michael, Fox, Edward, & McGill, Michael. (Eds.). (1991). A national electronic science, engineering, and technology library. http://fox.cs.vt.edu/DLSB.html

Miksa, Francis, & Doty, Philip. (1994). Intellectual realities and the digital library. In Proceedings of Digital Libraries '94: The first annual conference on the theory and practice of digital libraries (pp. 163-169). College Station, TX: Hypermedia Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University. Also available http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/csdl/DL94/paper/miksa.html

Rothenberg, Jeffrey. (1995). Ensuring the longevity of digital documents. Scientific American, 272(1), 24-29.

_____. (1997). Digital information lasts forever - or five years, whichever comes first. RAND Video V-079.

Sproull, Lee, & Kiesler, Sara. (1991). Connections: New ways of working in the networked organization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wilson, Patrick. (1983). Second-hand knowledge: An inquiry into cognitive authority. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.