Digital Libraries: Policy, Planning and Practice

Citation

Smith, A.G. (2005), "Digital Libraries: Policy, Planning and Practice", Online Information Review, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 324-325. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520510607641

This book examines a number of issues related to digital library implementation. It assembles many significant players: Lesk on economics, Harnad on scholarly publishing, Lazinger on preservation, and Fox on digital theses, among others. Although it has a European perspective, there is substantial input from North America.

The first part of the book is an overview of digital library issues, starting with a pair of reviews of the two major digital library research initiatives on either side of the Atlantic. Mischo examines US projects developed under the aegis of the Digital Library Initiative up to 2001. Pinfield examines the UK's e‐Lib research projects. These twin chapters summarise the first phase of DL initiatives and point to examples of projects whose life and influences have extended beyond the research phase, for example HERON, and identify lessons on how to develop and promote digital libraries. It is interesting that Pinfield identifies the change in culture as the most important contribution of the e‐Lib project: one hopes this means that the library profession will be well equipped for future IT developments.

On the matter of economics, Lesk describes the range of alternatives for funding digital libraries. It is a pity that Lesk's attempts to illustrate his economic points with graphs have been frustrated by mislabelling, although in general the level of proofreading of the volume is good. Harnad evangelises, as usual, for ubiquitous open e‐print archives and self‐archiving, including his famous recipe for getting around restrictive copyright conditions, and provides an FAQ addressing common concerns about web‐based publishing. Interestingly, at least one chapter author in this book has taken Harnad's advice and placed his chapter on his institutional server. Lazinger highlights the different aspects of preservation: the medium and the intellectual content, and includes some useful analyses of costs.

The second part of the book shows how specific implementations deal with the issues in practice. Dawson describes the Glasgow Digital Library (GDL), exploring issues in collaborative collection management: collection development policy, development methodology, user interfaces, information organisation, metadata, access and file management, user studies, information retrieval, legal issues, social issues, evaluation, standards, management, future directions, purpose and philosophy, content creation, learning materials, promotion. A revealing aspect of this paper is an estimate of the proportion of time spent on each issue; interestingly content creation was the most time‐intensive issue.

Dodd and Andrews describe the University of Central England Electronic Library (UCEEL), a digital library of learning resources for an academic institution committed to supporting flexible learning. Fox et al. describe the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD); this is useful for the way in which it highlights the international dimensions of this ongoing project. Increasing interest in retrieving musical/audio content from digital libraries is reflected in the account by Dunn et al. of the “Variations” digital music library projects and Indiana University: this raises interesting questions about the appropriate data models for musical works, which exist both as scores (“works”) and performances (“instantiations”). Perhaps the most valuable discussion of the issues is the overview by Kresh of the digital library programme at the Library of Congress, summarising lessons for the ultimate National Digital Library.

The book finishes with Collier's reflections on the role of Tilburg University Library, designed and built in the early 1990s as “the library of the future today”, but now looking towards a new learning centre designed to capitalise on e‐learning.

Although primarily written from the viewpoint of academic libraries, Digital Libraries: Policy, Planning and Practice has useful perspectives for all information managers interested in digital information delivery, and is a valuable resource for students studying digital libraries.