History of Digital Library in Information

Technology Era and Future Developments

in Digital Libraries
N. Kiran Suhas
Library Assistant, Central Library
Vijaynagar Institute of Medical Sciences, Bellary, India

International Journal of Advanced Research in Social Sciences & Humanities

Volume 3, Issue 1, January-June, 2015, pp. 14-17
ISSN Online: 2395-5228 Print: 2395-521X, DOA : 05052015
© IASTER 2014, www.iaster.com

ABSTRACT

Research and practice in digital libraries (DL) has exploded worldwide in the 1990s. Substantial
research funding has become available, libraries are actively involved in DL projects and
conferences, journals and online news lists proliferate. This article explores reasons for these
developments and the influence of key players, while speculating on future directions. The term
`digital library' is used in two distinct senses. In general, researchers view digital libraries as content
collected on behalf of user communities, while practicing librarians view digital libraries as
institutions or services. Tensions exist between these communities over the scope and concept of the
term `library'. Research-oriented definitions serve to build a community of researchers and to focus
attention on problems to be addressed; these definitions have expanded considerably in scope
throughout the 1990s. Library community definitions are more recent and serve to focus attention on
practical challenges to be addressed in the transformation of research libraries and universities.
Future trends point toward the need for extensive research in digital libraries and for the
transformation of libraries as institutions. The present ambiguity of terminology is hindering the
advance of research and practice in digital libraries and in our ability to communicate the scope and
significance of our work.

INTRODUCTION

Scholarly and professional interest in digital libraries has grown rapidly throughout the 1990s. In the
United States, The term digital library has been applied to a wide variety of offerings from collections
of electronic journals to software agents that support inquiry-based education to collections of email
to electronic versions of a public library, to personal information collections, and even to the entire
Internet. The one property these various entities have in common is their digitization or digital
coherence (Daniel Atkins). Digital coherence means all the objects in a digital library, whether
sounds, images, texts, or some other media, can be treated in essentially the same way. Prior to digital
coherence, libraries needed to treat various media, for example, books, journals, videos, and musical
recordings, differently (Harter, 1997). One could say that digital coherence is the mechanism which
permits a form of equality among various information resources. This equality has importance for
delivery and integration of information.

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HISTORY

In 1939, before the first digital computer system was designed, Vannevar-Bush, a professor of
electrical engineering at MIT proposed a system that in many ways foreshadowed modern digital
libraries. [Bush 1939, 1945] (Bush would become head of the Office of Scientific Research and
Development during World War 2 and then one of the chief advocates for the creation of the National
Science Foundation.) This system, the “Memex”, was designed to microfilm entire libraries of books
and journals, combine these with individuals’ private notes and indexes, and make them available on
the desktop. Bush envisioned that the Memex would enable users and information professionals to
create new organizations of knowledge through ‘associative trails’, links among parts of different
documents. Although this system was never built, Bush’s ideas inspired generations of future
computer scientists, including J.C.R. Licklider, who made fundamental contributions to the
development of personal computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, the internet, and digital libraries.
Licklider envisioned much of the design of modern digital libraries, including the integration of
indexing, search, retrieval, and storage services. [Licklider 1965].

Although lacking the characteristic search and direct access capabilities of modern digital libraries,
social science data archives were, in a sense, the first digital libraries, since they maintained and
outside users access to large collections of digital material. Many of these collections were started in
the 1950’s when social scientists realized that it was crucial their research surveys (etc.), recorded in
digital form, be preserved for future research. [Bisco 1970] In the 1970’s through the late 80’s, digital
technology was adopted in most libraries, primarily in the form of OPAC’s (online public access
catalog), which replaced card catalogs.

It was not until the early 1990’s, when the burgeoning World-Wide-Web, made dramatically more
useful by indexing services such as Lycos (one of the early and dramatic successes of Internet search),
greatly accelerated the growth of digital libraries and brought the combination of access and content that
is their modern hallmark. Government funding was crucial to early developments in digital library
technology, and continues to remain important. For example, the Lycos search engine emerged from
work done by the Informedia project at Carnegie-Mellon, and the immensely popular Google search
service emerged from Stanford’s Interlib project. Both of these projects were initially funded under the
Digital Library Initiative, a joint project of NSF, NASA, and DARPA. The two phases of this initiative
sponsored some of the most innovative efforts in digital libraries across a decade. (see Griffin, 1998)
Other U.S. government programs such as the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation
program (NDIIPP), funded by the Library of Congress, and the NSF’s National Science Digital Library,
continue to support innovative research in this area. Other countries have also contributed funding,
mostly focused on the digitization of content, although some organizations such as the U.K.’s JISC
(Joint Information Systems Committee) have funded a mix of content and innovative research.

Search and information retrieval have long been significant components of digital libraries, and
commercial search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN are now extremely popular. Search
engines do not, however, constitute digital libraries, which integrate collection management, access,
and other services. Some notable examples of modern digital libraries include the arXiv pre-print
server [McKiernan, 2000]; and the many on-line electronic journals collections made available
through the JSTOR project [Guthrie 2001] and by many of the major commercial and open
publishers. (Also see D-lib magazine, which routinely highlights notable digital collections.)
Moreover, within the last five years, software systems that provide complete digital library services
have become available, including: Greenstone [Witten 2002], VDC [Altman, et. al 1999], Fedora [see
Lagoze , et. al 2005], and DSPACE [Tansley, et. al 2003].

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FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS IN DIGITAL LIBRARIES

According to the most recent understanding, the DLs of the future will be able to operate over a large
variety of information object types - far wider than those maintained today in physical libraries and
archives. These information objects will be composed of several multi-type and multimedia
components aggregated in an unlimited number of formats. These, for example, can mix text, tables of
scientific data and images obtained by processing earth observation data, or they can integrate 3D
images, annotations and videos. These new information objects will offer innovative and more
powerful means to researchers for sharing and discussing the results of their work. In order to be able
to support these objects, the DL functionality has to be appropriately extended far beyond that
required to manipulate the simple digital surrogates of the physical objects. In order to support these
objects the DL may need considerable resources. For example, the creation and handling of the new
documents may require access to many different, large, heterogeneous information sources, the use of
specialised services that process the objects stored in these sources for producing new information,
and the exploitation of large processing capabilities for performing this tasks.

New DLs are also required to offer a much richer set of services to their users than in the past. In
particular, they must support the activities of their users by providing functionalities that may range
from general utilities, like annotation, summarization or co-operative work support, to very audience-
specific functions, like map processing, semantic analysis of images, or simulation. The availability of
this new DL functionality can, in principle, change the way in which research is conducted. By
exploiting such types of DL, for example, a scientist can annotate the article of a colleague with a
programme that extracts useful information from a large amount of data collected by a specific
scientific observatory. This programme, executed on demand when the annotation is accessed, can
complement the content of the paper with continuously refreshed information.

In the new DLs users are not only consumers but also producers of information. By elaborating
information gathered through the DL they can create new information objects that are published in the
DL, thus enriching its content. The new DLs are thus required to offer services that support the
authoring of these new objects and the workflows that lead to their publication.

In parallel with the above evolution of the role of DL systems, we are now observing a large
expansion in the demand for DLs. Research today is often a collaborative effort carried out by groups
belonging to different organizations spread worldwide. Motivated by a common goal and funding
opportunities, these groups dynamically aggregate into virtual research organizations that share their
resources, e.g. knowledge, experimentation results, or instruments, for the duration of their
collaboration, creating new and more powerful virtual research environments. These virtual research
organizations, set up by individuals that do not necessarily have great economic power or technical
expertise, more and more frequently require DLs as tools for accelerating the achievement of their
research results. This new potential audience demands less expensive and more dynamic DL
development models. They want to be able to set up new DLs that serve their needs for the duration of
their collaborations in an acceptable timeframe and with an acceptable cost. The current DL
development model cannot satisfy this large demand; a radical change is needed if we want to be able
to address these new emerging requirements.

A great contribution towards the satisfaction of all the above mentioned requirements can certainly
come from the introduction of mechanisms that support a controlled sharing of resources among
different organisations. Sharing in this context is not only applied to repositories of content, as is

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usually meant today, but can be extended to any type of resource needed to build a DL, i.e. language
and ontology resources, applications, computers and even staff with the necessary skills for
supporting the DL development, deployment and maintenance. Supporting this type of sharing
requires the introduction of appropriate solutions at both the technological and organisational levels.
These two levels are not independent; instead they strongly influence each other. In fact, the
availability of a good technological solution favours the creation of an appropriate organization, and
vice-versa, a successful organization stimulates the development of new supporting technologies.

CONCLUSTION

The future development look of the Digital library will be very different from what it is now. Clearly,
consortia will become even more important forces in the electronic information world. As long as
they can prove that they are providing a cost-efficient product that is used, they will continue to
receive the support of funding agencies.

REFERENCES

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7 June 2002, available at:
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(accessed 4 May 2006).
[3] Foster, I. and Kesselman, C. (Eds.) (2004), The Grid: Blueprint for a Future Computing
Infrastructure, 2 ed., Kaufmann, Amsterdam.
[4] Foster, I., Kesselman, C. and Tuecke, S. (2001), “The anatomy of the Grid: enabling scalable
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[5] Foster, I., Frey, J., Graham, S. and Tuecke, S. (Eds.) (2004) Modeling Stateful Resources with
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