[7.1. The Digital Library: A Definition / 7.2. Digital Libraries: Some Examples / 7.3. Digital Image Collections / 7.4. Future Trends for Digital Libraries]
7.1. The Digital Library: A Definition
Digital libraries may be the major contribution from the print media to the
Internet, and vice versa.
Thanks to the Internet, hundreds of public works, literary and scientific documents, articles, academic and research works, pictures and sound tracks are available on the screen for free. The collections of existing digital libraries increase regularly, and new digital libraries come up constantly.
Some digital libraries are created by "traditional" libraries who want to put their documents at the disposal of Internet users. Other digital libraries are "only" digital - their life is 100% on the Web.
Hosted by the Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Universal Library defines the digital library as "a digital library of digital documents, artifacts, and records. The advantage of having library material available in digital form is threefold: (1) the content occupies less space and can be replicated and made secure electronically, (2) the content can be made immediately available over the Internet to anyone, anywhere, and (3) search for content can be automated. The promise of the digital library is the promise of great cost reductions while providing great increases in archive availability and accessibility. […]
There are literally thousands of digital library initiatives of a great many varieties going on in the world today. Digital libraries are being formed of scholarly works, archives of historical figures and events, corporate and governmental records, museum collections and religious collections. Some take the form of scanning and putting documents to the World Wide Web. Still other digital libraries are formed of digitizing paintings, films and music. Work even exists in 3D reconstructive digitization that permits a digital deconstruction, storage, transmission, and reconstruction of solid object."
The British Library is a pioneer in Europe for research relating to digital libraries. Some treasures of the library are already on-line: Beowulf, the first great English masterpiece dated 11th century; Magna Carta, one example from 1215 issued over the Great Seal of King John; the Lindisfarne Gospels, dated 698; the Diamond Sutra, dated 868, which is the world's earliest printed book; the Sforza Hours, dated 1490-1520, which is an outstanding Renaissance treasure; the Codex Arundel, a notebook of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519), and the Tyndale New Testament, which was the first printed New Testament in English, from the press of Peter Schoeffer in Worms.
Brian Lang, Chief Executive of the British Library, states on the British
Library website:
"We do not envisage an exclusively digital library. We are aware that some people feel that digital materials will predominate in libraries of the future. Others anticipate that the impact will be slight. In the context of the British Library, printed books, manuscripts, maps, music, sound recordings and all the other existing materials in the collection will always retain their central importance, and we are committed to continuing to provide, and to improve, access to these in our reading rooms. The importance of digital materials will, however, increase. We recognize that network infrastructure is at present most strongly developed in the higher education sector, but there are signs that similar facilities will also be available elsewhere, particularly in the industrial and commercial sector, and for public libraries. Our vision of network access encompasses all these."