Managing Digital Resources in Libraries

Citation

Bengtson, J.B. (2006), "Managing Digital Resources in Libraries", Library Review, Vol. 55 No. 7, pp. 451-452. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530610682182

Managing Digital Resources in Libraries bills itself as a practical guide to managing library materials in digital formats. The contributions are divided into four sections: licensing; opinions, research and analysis; systems and software; and special projects and histories. The volume comes in a year that has seen Google announce its plans to digitize and index millions of books (both in and out of copyright) from a handful of the world's major libraries, and its competitors Yahoo and Microsoft join with the Internet Archive and the British Library, two of the largest university libraries (Toronto and Berkeley, the third and fourth largest collections in North America, respectively), and other libraries and businesses in a similar scheme of mass digitization under the guise of the “Open Content Alliance” (available at: www.opencontentalliance.org).

Indeed, 2005 is shaping up to be the year when “digital libraries” have arrived at a tipping point that sees the bulk of the world's print heritage made available electronically within the coming years. Much like the print revolution started by Gutenberg 550 years previously, the digital revolution (or perhaps more precisely, the “digitization revolution”) will not happen overnight, although the rate of change is faster than was the spread of the printing press.

The use of digital resources will continue to evolve substantively, as more becomes available and as providers (including libraries) understand more fully what users want from electronic materials and how they use such material. Libraries are where much of this change is taking place and the articles in this volume provide snapshots of how librarians are responding to some of the challenges in areas of access and preservation of electronic information.

Not unexpectedly, the management of electronic journals is strongly represented. There are informative articles about the changing job requirements of librarians that may well lead to a “new paradigm of librarianship” and a discussion of recent projects that promote the use of personal digital assistants (PDAs) in delivering library resources to users. The two articles on licensing provide a solid overview of the complications of electronic rights holding and suggestions as to how potentially to resolve some of these issues.

In the new world of digital resources, volumes like Managing Digital Resources in Libraries are essential signposts in an ever expanding and always shifting terrain. As librarians work towards providing wider access to more information, the profession must find a common ground with the interests and expectations of publishers, rights holders and users. This convergence of stakeholders must happen on a global scale before the true potential of the technology can be fully exploited and one of the strengths of this volume is that the contributors are not all from the US.