Counting by ones and zeros

Citation

Maxymuk, J. (1999), "Counting by ones and zeros", The Bottom Line, Vol. 12 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.1999.17012aag.001

Counting by ones and zeros

Counting by ones and zeros

Keywords: Electronic information resources, Libraries, Virtual reality

The subtext of the story of civilization over the past 50 years has been the increasingly swift conversion of life's rhythms to the constant computerized heartbeat of ones and zeros. Early mainframes established the infrastructure to allow many of the organizing systems in life (such as banking, taxes, and medical records) to become electronic. Over the past two decades, the subsequent exponential advances in microcomputer hardware and software have transferred most of the mechanisms of life to a digital basis.

Microchips serve as the brains of essentially all the major appliances in your home as well as the vehicle you drive. The first digital televisions hit the market in November 1998, and Congress has mandated that all TV stations broadcast fully via digital signals by 2005. The two other most prominent forms of entertainment, popular music and movies, are thoroughly reliant on current technology. Music is recorded and stored digitally on compact discs and audio tapes so it can be played repeatedly with precise sound quality reproduction on the consumer's home or car stereo. Movies heighten their approximation of reality with computerized audio and visual techniques far beyond anything even Thomas Edison might have imagined possible.

It is clear that information is being conveyed digitally to an ever greater extent. This column was typed on a word processor and submitted via e-mail to my editor for him to electronically alter to fit the formatting of the journal. From my Web site, you can click on the links cited in the column and go directly to those sites. While on the Web, perhaps you would like to read the daily New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/) or your local newspaper for that matter. Maybe you would like to listen to David Letterman's monolog from last night's show (http://marketing.cbs.com/lateshow/) or go to the CNN site to view a video of breaking news (http://cnn.com/). In today's world, digital information flows quickly in many forms and many different directions, but a library is still considered a physical building geographically situated at precise digital coordinates on the globe. What in the name of ENIAC is a digital library?

Coming to terms

Defining the digital library is not an absolute science. To begin, we could view a digital library as being analogous to a traditional library in that they both aim to provide access to a collection of materials to their users. The most idealistic proponents of digital libraries often see them as having nearly unlimited possibilities for providing the extensive multimedia resources for all levels of research worldwide to the screens of any connected users regardless of age or background.

There are at least ten principles inherent in that Utopian goal:

1. 1.

   The physical location of the library is immaterial.

2. 2.

   A user's access is not limited to his being in any particular place.

3. 3.

   A user's access is not limited to the normal work hours of staff.

4. 4.

   There are essentially unlimited copies of all resources; nothing is ever "checked out."

5. 5.

   Retrieval of materials is easy and instantaneous; there are no closed stacks or missing items.

6. 6.

   The retrieval interface is fully integrated with all library systems.

7. 7.

   Materials include complete intellectual content ­ for example, full text rather than brief records.

8. 8.

   Materials are provided in a readily usable format.

9. 9.

   Materials do not deteriorate over time and will persist; the ether of cyberspace is acid-free.

10. 10.

    The global network platform is robust, stable and free.

Additional elements could make a digital library more attractive to a user population. Library staff should be available in some form to assist with questions, provide direction, and field comments. Online researchers might want a facility to interact and communicate with other researchers. User friendly software and pleasing screen design have their places as well.

These are indeed the early pioneering days for digital libraries, and those scouts who are blazing an electronic trail are in the process of working out these details. At this point, there are a handful of prototypes accessible on the Web which take different approaches to how they define themselves as digital libraries. They are attempting different things to serve different clientele, and their success must be judged in that light.

Web organizers

One approach is a traditional one for librarians ­ organizing the vast array of existing resources on the Web into a system that makes them able to be found with ease. This approach tends to look like the popular Yahoo site (http://www. yahoo.com). Both the WWW Virtual Library (http://vlib. stanford.edu/Home.html) and the Librarian's Index to the Internet (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/InternetIndex/) go in this direction, and they are really online hypertext equivalents of a collection of pathfinders. This approach can have real value, but one senses that it is merely a first step on the road to the digital library.

A variation to this approach is to use existing library cataloging and classification schemes to systematize the Web. Morton Grove Public Library's Webrary site (http://www.webrary.org/ref/weblinksmenu.html) arranges its subject arrangement to the Net by the Dewey Decimal System. This may draw the curious librarian to take a look, but most users probably want as little to do with artificially-devised library schemes as possible.

A more interesting variation is the Internet Public Library (IPL) (http://www.ipl.org/) which grew out of a graduate seminar at the University of Michigan's School of Information and Library Studies in 1995 to become a semi-independent entity. IPL is set up to mirror a traditional library. In addition to providing annotated hypertext subject guides to Web sites, IPL permits users to view online exhibits, ask reference questions by e-mail (although with admittedly slow turnaround time), or visit a reading room of over 7,500 electronic texts (again arranged by Dewey cataloging and classification). As part of their mission statement, they say they are trying to "create a strong, coherent sense of place on the Internet, while ensuring that our library remains a useful and consistently innovative environment as well as fun and easy to use." They are succeeding in that.

Multimedia collections

A second approach to the digital library is the display of digitized in-house special collections ­ usually with a multimedia aspect. The most prominent of these is the Library of Congress' American Memory (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ ammem/) which began a number of years ago as a multimedia optical disc project. It has grown markedly since then and features approximately 40 collections of materials in the categories of photographs and prints, documents, motion pictures, maps, and sound recordings. Baseball cards from the turn of the century, film of President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition where he was shot, railroad maps from the 1800s, sound recordings of vaudeville performers from the early years of this century are examples of some of the materials accessible so far. American Memory has been a leader in digitizing and making accessible fascinating historical collections. They are to be commended and, I hope, emulated.

Other libraries pursue this approach, too. The New York Public Library's Digital Library Collections site (http://digital.nypl.org/) provides access to parts of their renowned Schomburg Collection of African American resources, Various online exhibits, and finding aids to the Billy Rose Theatre Collection and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound. The Cleveland Digital Library hosted by Cleveland State University (http://web.ulib.csuohio.edu/SpecColl/cdl/) presents virtual Cleveland history in the form of texts, maps, and images. Overall this approach opens a wide horizon of special materials to the world.

Research facilitators

A third approach is a further refinement of making available digitized special collections to the world, and that is facilitating communication among researchers in a particular discipline. The best example of that is the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Library Without Walls (http://lib-www.lanl.gov/lww/) which lists its goal as the "creation of a network of knowledge systems that facilitate collaboration among researchers." The Library Without Walls does this by offering full access to such electronic resources as preprints of scientific articles, unclassified publications from Los Alamos, and technical reports regarding the Lab. Many other databases are available to researchers directly affiliated with LANL.

Another representative of this type is the Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/) at Tufts University. Perseus is a digital library designed for classics researchers and began as a CD-ROM in the 1980s. Its resources include ancient texts and translations, philological tools, maps, art catalogs, and images of museum art objects. One last illustration of this type is the Alexandria Digital Library (http://alexandria.sdc.ucsb.edu/) hosted by the University of California at Santa Barbara to create a digital library for multimedia geographical information. The Alexandria project is also involved in developing the technology to support a digital library of geographic datasets and maps for online researchers.

Digital librarians

As more digital information is made widely available, many users of traditional libraries may find less need to visit in person. If users no longer need to come into our building to do their research, does that mean we librarians should start for the unemployment office now so we can get a good place in line? No, but we will need to make sure that our efforts to serve our public are not so anonymous that they are easily ignored.

Aside from administrative functions, librarians perform four main duties: cataloging, instruction, reference, and collection development. These are the functions that make materials available, accessible, findable, and usable to users. While these tasks evolve in the digital environment, they do not disappear. When we create subject guides on the Web, we are cataloging, classifying, and organizing the Internet. When we field questions via e-mail, we are doing reference. If we put up an online tutorial to an electronic resource on our server, we are performing instruction.

In fact, our skills are probably more necessary in the wide open, anarchic, electronic frontier than in the more stable world of paper and dust. Getting the word out about how we can help is probably needed more in this environment also because naïve users frequently have no idea how to find what they really need. Our public relations skills must come into play so that users are aware of what service we can be to them.

Above all, we need to stay current ourselves. Many groups and organizations are exploring these and other issues. The Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University http://csdl.tamu.edu/ states its mission as "to foster pioneering research on the theory and application of digital libraries and to create flexible and efficient new technologies for their use." They attempt this by focussing on such new technologies as electronic document modeling and publication, hyperbase systems, process-based and spatial hypermedia systems, collaborative systems, and computer-human interaction. Similarly, the Council on Library and Information Resources' Digital Library Federation (http://www.clir.org/diglib/dlfhomepage.htm) aims "to establish the conditions for creating, maintaining, expanding, and preserving a distributed collection of digital materials accessible to scholars, students, and a wider public."

In the UK, eLib: the Electronic Libraries Programme (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/) is promoting around 60 projects related to digital libraries. Back in the USA, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have joined forces on the Digital Libraries Initiative (http://www.cise.nsf.gov/iis/dli_home.html). The Digital Library Initiative is working with major universities such as Stanford and the University of Michigan to "advance the means to collect, store, and organize information in digital forms, and make it available for searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks ­ all in user-friendly ways." The Alexandria Digital Library noted above is part of this Initiative.

There are also two electronic journals on the subject which should be monitored by anyone interested in the subject. D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/) bills itself as "The Magazine of Digital Library Research." On the other side of the Atlantic, Ariadne (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/) is a newsletter that performs a similar job for the UK. Finally, two useful Web sites that point to a wide assortment of electronic information on digital libraries are the University of California, Berkeley's Digital Library Resources page (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Info/) and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions' site (http://www.ifla.org/II/index.htm) .

All libraries are becoming increasingly electronic, but that does not make all libraries digital. Whether all libraries can truly call themselves digital in five, ten, or even 50 years is a matter of conjecture. Perhaps by 2049 all libraries will be electronic, and repositories of print will exist only as neglected archives for dogged historians. However, whatever changes occur in the future, all librarians need to know how to find their way through the cyberstacks today.

Comments on this column are welcome and can be sent to maxymuk@crab.rutgers.edu Or visit my Web page (http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~maxymuk/home/home.html). Links to Web sites referred to in this column can be found there.

John Maxymuk is References Librarian at the Paul Robeson Library, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA.