Digital Libraries: Principles and Practice in a Global Environment

Citation

Calvert, P. (2006), "Digital Libraries: Principles and Practice in a Global Environment", Online Information Review, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 78-79. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520610650336

Digital libraries have been one of the “hot” topics in library and information management for five years or so, and there is little sign of a cool change. There has been a plethora of books about digital libraries from almost all points of view; mostly general books about what they are, why we need them, how to manage one, how to select resources for one, and so on. Then there are the specialist books about topics such as their social impact and the software they use, and there are books about digital libraries in one country or region. This book seems to use a wide definition of the term “digital libraries”, for it covers all kinds of electronic resources such as e‐journals and e‐books that are becoming fairly standard fare in most Western libraries. The authors have made a serious attempt to write an international book, and in that aim they have succeeded.

The topics one might expect can all be found here: digital libraries in different kinds of information organisations; barriers to user access; the kinds of e‐materials available; metadata, standards and interoperability; the various types of software for digital libraries (including museum software); interface design; browsing and retrieval; and miscellaneous issues such as installation, evaluation, the use of consortia and intellectual property rights. There are eight digital library case studies in the final chapter; and to illustrate how hard the authors have tried to make this book international in scope, the cases come from the UK (two), Italy, Sri Lanka, India, Singapore, the USA and Canada. It is stronger on matters such as interface design and metadata than it is on others, and I think more should have been said about copyright and intellectual property, even though the legislation will vary from country to country.

I wonder how much we need more books like this one. Certainly most libraries are still in need of new staff with a working knowledge of managing electronic resources, and that will be true for some years to come. When will this knowledge become mainstream? I suspect that what we need now is more on actual digitisation, including some “hard” technical knowledge of XML and database management.

In many ways this book covers the same territory as Digital Libraries: Policy, Planning and Practice, edited by Andrews and Law (Ashgate, 2004), and there is not much to pick between them. If you are intending to start a digital library, then the book I recommend is still Digital Futures: Strategies for the Information Age by Deegan and Tanner (Library Association, 2002). For rather more technical detail I suggest How to Build a Digital Library by Witten and Bainbridge (Elsevier Science, 2002), though I wish they would write a new edition. On the place of digital libraries in the wider information and communication world, no book has yet surpassed Borgman's From Gutenburg to The Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2000).