Characteristics Of Virtual Library
Azalee Freas
After I had read this discussion thread and gotten lots of ideas about virtual libraries and had an idea of what the issues were to consider when creating a virtual library, and was really excited about the topic, I finally looked at the dates of all of the postings. They were all made in February of 1993.
I was crushed. I thought I would have to start all over again, but the more I thought about it, the opinions and frustrations that librarians expressed about virtual libraries back in 1993 are still with us today. As much as technology has moved forward, sometimes at what seems like lightening speed, the things that librarians deal with in terms of virtual libraries are very much the same.
What is a virtual library? The term has been defined by many different people in many different ways. It is a library in which the holdings are found in electronic stacks. It is a library that exists, without any regard to a physical space or location. It is a technological way to bring together the resources of various libraries and information services, both internal and external, all in one place, so users can find what they need quickly and easily.
However, when they work, virtual libraries can be very useful and very diverse in what they contain. The options for what they can include are virtually endless, and become more and more boundless as technology advances. Some of the content of a virtual library may include, but certainly is not limited to, CD-ROM, Internet subscriptions, lists of annotated web links, internal work products (such as brief banks), proprietary databases (such as LexisNexis or Westlaw) and even web spiders or push technology that deliver targeted research to the user.
I must digress here and say that the last advantage is sometimes not true. Although a virtual library does not require as much time from the library filers and shelvers, it takes a lot more time from a librarian, and/or possibly someone in the IT department, to learn how to install, maintain and use the product.
As much as I hated to do it, I did come up with more disadvantages than advantages to the virtual library. But, I think with advances in technology, publishers are working at trying to erase the disadvantages and, as time goes on, this list will shrink. But, for now, the disadvantages include the following:
The last point is a very interesting one, I think. It used to be that users had a comfort level with books, and I think that is changing as more and more young associates come into law firms, having gone to school using computers for research more than books. However, what still holds true is that, with a book, or set of books, there is a quantifiable beginning and end, which is not as clear with digital products and gets even more blurred when users move out onto the Internet. This is the place where librarians are most useful, assisting users at figuring out when to stop and how to separate the good from the bad.
The last three are actually a continuous loop. With new users constantly coming and going, and changes and upgrades being made to the products, marketing, training and evaluating is an ongoing process.
These are the questions that get posed to the librarian and ones that librarians are probably used to hearing and answering. This is our role, to educate management and users about what the virtual library means for them. This is much different from what it is for us. For us, it is a stream of e-mails or phone calls to vendor support, contract negotiations and technical problems.
What will the role of the librarian be in all of this? Will librarians even exist at all? The simple answer, again, is yes, definitely. Librarians will continue to be able to do and provide more for users than ever before with the advantages provided by virtual libraries. We will continue to work towards providing users with seamless, organized access to virtual library resources. Perhaps we will even start to push the envelope and become innovators in the use of nontraditional training and reference services. Who knows? As long as librarians continue to share with one another, both informally and on Internet discussion lists, and at conferences, the opportunities and possibilities are ours for the taking.
A digital library (also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, a library without walls, or a digital collection) is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital media formats or a library accessible through the internet. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection. Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals or organizations.[1] The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. These information retrieval systems are able to exchange information with each other through interoperability and sustainability.[2]
The early history of digital libraries is not well documented, but several key thinkers are connected to the emergence of the concept.[3] Predecessors include Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine's Mundaneum, an attempt begun in 1895 to gather and systematically catalogue the world's knowledge, with the hope of bringing about world peace.[4] The visions of the digital library were largely realized a century later during the great expansion of the Internet.[5]
Vannevar Bush and J.C.R. Licklider are two contributors that advanced this idea into then current technology. Bush had supported research that led to the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. After seeing the disaster, he wanted to create a machine that would show how technology can lead to understanding instead of destruction. This machine would include a desk with two screens, switches and buttons, and a keyboard.[6] He named this the "Memex". This way individuals would be able to access stored books and files at a rapid speed. In 1956, Ford Foundation funded Licklider to analyze how libraries could be improved with technology. Almost a decade later, his book entitled "Libraries of the Future" included his vision. He wanted to create a system that would use computers and networks so human knowledge would be accessible for human needs and feedback would be automatic for machine purposes. This system contained three components, the corpus of knowledge, the question, and the answer. Licklider called it a procognitive system.
In 1980 the role of the library in an electronic society was the focus of a clinic on library applications of data processing. Participants included Frederick Wilfrid Lancaster, Derek De Solla Price, Gerard Salton, and Michael Gorman).[7]
Early projects centered on the creation of an electronic card catalogue known as Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). By the 1980s, the success of these endeavors resulted in OPAC replacing the traditional card catalog in many academic, public and special libraries. This permitted libraries to undertake additional rewarding co-operative efforts to support resource sharing and expand access to library materials beyond an individual library.
An early example of a digital library is the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), a database of education citations, abstracts and texts that was created in 1964 and made available online through DIALOG in 1969.[8]
In 1994, digital libraries became widely visible in the research community due to a $24.4 million NSF managed program supported jointly by DARPA's Intelligent Integration of Information (I3) program, NASA, and NSF itself.[9] Successful research proposals came from six U.S. universities.[10] The universities included Carnegie Mellon University, University of California-Berkeley, University of Michigan, University of Illinois, University of California-Santa Barbara, and Stanford University. Articles from the projects summarized their progress at their halfway point in May 1996.[11] Stanford research, by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, led to the founding of Google.
The term digital library was first popularized by the NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative in 1994.[16] With the availability of the computer networks the information resources are expected to stay distributed and accessed as needed, whereas in Vannevar Bush's essay As We May Think (1945) they were to be collected and kept within the researcher's Memex.
The term virtual library was initially used interchangeably with digital library, but is now primarily used for libraries that are virtual in other senses (such as libraries which aggregate distributed content). In the early days of digital libraries, there was discussion of the similarities and differences among the terms digital, virtual, and electronic.[17]
A distinction is often made between content that was created in a digital format, known as born-digital, and information that has been converted from a physical medium, e.g. paper, through digitization. Not all electronic content is in digital data format. The term hybrid library is sometimes used for libraries that have both physical collections and electronic collections. For example, American Memory is a digital library within the Library of Congress.
Some important digital libraries also serve as long term archives, such as arXiv and the Internet Archive. Others, such as the Digital Public Library of America, seek to make digital information from various institutions widely accessible online.[18]
Many academic libraries are actively involved in building repositories of their institution's books, papers, theses, and other works that can be digitized or were 'born digital'. Many of these repositories are made available to the general public with few restrictions, in accordance with the goals of open access, in contrast to the publication of research in commercial journals, where the publishers usually limit access rights. Irrespective of access rights, institutional, truly free, and corporate repositories can be referred to as digital libraries. Institutional repository software is designed for archiving, organizing, and searching a library's content. Popular open-source solutions include DSpace, Greenstone Digital Library (GSDL), EPrints, Digital Commons, and the Fedora Commons-based systems Islandora and Samvera.[19]
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