The major problem of the cyberlibrary is the fact that recent documents cannot be posted because they don't belong to the public domain. Some projects, like DOI: The Digital Identifier System, an identification system for digital media, will enable automated copyright management systems.
Another problem is format harmonization, to allow the downloading of the texts by any hardware and software. Libraries often choose the ASCII format (ASCII: American standard code for information interchange) or the SGML format (SGML: standard generalized markup language).
Many organizations are involved in research relating to digital libraries.
Sponsored by the The Library of UC Berkeley and Sun Microsystems, SunSITE is the site where the Berkeley Digital Library builds digital collections and services while providing information and support to others doing the same. Its contents are: catalogs and indexes; help/search tools and administrative info; Java corner; teaching and training; text and image collections; information for digital library developers; research and development: where digital libraries are being built; tools: software for building digital libraries.
The Digital Library Technology (DLT) Project supports the development of new technologies to facilitate public access to the data of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) via computer networks, particularly technologies that develop tools, applications, and software and hardware systems that are able to scale upward to accommodate evolving user requirements and order-of-magnitude increases in user access.
The Stanford Universities Digital Libraries Project deals primarily with computing literature, with a strong focus on networked information sources. It is one participant among five universities of the Digital Library Initiative, supported by the NSF (National Science Foundation), DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). "The Initiative's focus is to dramatically advance the means to collect, store, and organize information in digital forms, and make it available for searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks - all in user-friendly ways."
Library 2000 gives the historical record of a project held by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) between Fall 1995 and February 1998. Library 2000 was a computer systems research project that explored the implications of large-scale on-line storage using the future electronic library as an example. The project was pragmatic, developing a prototype using the technology and system configurations expected to be economically feasible in the year 2000.
Based at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), the D-Lib Program supports the community of people with research interests in digital libraries and electronic publishing. D-Lib Magazine, the magazine of digital library research, is a monthly compilation of contributed stories, commentary, and briefings.
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) provides a very interesting section Electronic Collections and Services.