Keywords
Citation
Meaden, K. (2003), "Introduction to Digital Libraries", New Library World, Vol. 104 No. 7/8, pp. 323-324. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074800310488112
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
This new publication by Chowdhury and Chowdhury adds to their growing empire of introductory texts, following in the footsteps of Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval, Information Sources and Searching on the World Wide Web and Searching CD‐ROM and Online Information Sources.
The opening chapter of the book begins with a series of definitions of “the digital library”, including an emphasis on electronic content, an emphasis on electronic services and an explanation of hybrid libraries. The authors attempt to fuse these and provide a set of characteristics that a library should possess in order to deserve the term “digital”. The themes introduced in this chapter are then expanded throughout the rest of the book.
Introduction to Digital Libraries, according to the preface, “aims to provide a comprehensive view of digital libraries” encompassing their design, development and management. It achieves this by providing extensive information relating to design issues, collection management, information organization, access and user‐interface, archiving and preservation, evaluation criteria and social, economic and legal issues. It also contains two chapters which outline current digital library research around the world (the USA, the UK, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and trends in its development. The latter are particularly useful, as specific examples are cited and screen shots provided where appropriate.
While it has primarily been written to meet the needs of students on information and library science courses, the research focus ensures that the text will be equally relevant to the qualified information professional or researcher. Furthermore, the chapters themselves can be read individually if the reader does not have time to indulge in a holistic approach and therefore the text works well as a reference guide to good practice for those librarians and information professionals working in an electronic environment.
The only downside is that the information it contains will probably age quite quickly, due to the speed of developments in the digital library field.