Digital library 2

Academic repositories

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.

Digital archives

Physical archives differ from physical libraries in several ways. Traditionally, archives were defined as:

   1. Containing primary sources of information (typically letters and papers directly produced by an individual or organization) rather than the secondary sources found in a library (books, periodicals, etc);

   2. Having their contents organized in groups rather than individual items.

   3. Having unique contents.

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. In other words, "digital archives" or "online archives" will still generally contain primary sources, but they are likely to be described individually rather than (or in addition to) in groups or collections, and because they are digital their contents are easily reproducible and may indeed have been reproduced from elsewhere. The Oxford Text Archive is generally considered to be the oldest digital archive of academic physical primary source materials.

The future

Large scale digitization projects are underway at Google, the Million Book Project, and Internet Archive. 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.

According to Larry Lannom, Director of Information Management Technology at the nonprofit Corporation for National Research Initiatives, “all the problems associated with digital libraries are wrapped up in archiving.” He goes on to state, “If in 100 years people can still read your article, we’ll have solved the problem.” Daniel Akst, author of The Webster Chronicle, proposes that “the future of libraries—and of information—is digital.” Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, information scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, estimate that “the world’s total yearly production of print, film, optical, and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage.” Therefore, they believe that “soon it will be technologically possible for an average person to access virtually all recorded information.”

 

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