April 1995 - Vol. 38 No. 4

As one of the five universities participating in the ARPA-sponsored Computer Science Technical Report project, we at Cornell have developed a digital library architecture called Dienst. Dienst is a protocol and implementation that provides Internet access to a distributed, decentralized multi-format document collection. The collection is managed by a set of interoperating Dienst servers distributed over the Internet. These servers provide three digital library services: repositories of multi-format documents; indexes into the document collection and search engines for these indexes; and user interfaces for browsing, searching, and accessing the collection.

The Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project will develop enabling technologies for an integrated “virtual” library to provide an array of new services and uniform access to networked information collections. The Integrated Digital Library will create a shared environment linking everything from personal information collections, to collections of conventional libraries, to large data collections shared by scientists.

The University of Illinois is building a large-scale digital library testbed, planned to grow to thousands of users and thousands of documents, with the goal of bringing professional quality search and display to Internet information services. Concurrently, research is designing and implementing a prototype of the Interspace, a vision of what the Internet will evolve into where the distributed network of interconnected machines is replaced by a distributed space of interlinked information.

The University of Michigan Digital Library Project (NSF-UMDL) is a multidisciplinary collaboration among faculty and staff throughout the University of Michigan. Initial use and evaluation of the NSF-UMDL will take place in science classes in Ann Arbor, Mich. high schools and the Stuyvesant High School in New York City, as well as instruction and research at the university. Access will also be available through Ann Arbor and New York City public libraries. External partners to the project include: IBM, Elsevier Science, Apple Computer, Bellcore, UMI International, McGraw-Hall, Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation, and Kodak.

The British Library holds over 18 million volumes and is one of the world's greatest treasure houses of written information from every age and culture. In 1993 it published its Strategic Objectives for the Year 2000, which made a commitment to providing maximum access to the collection using digital and networking technologies for onsite and remote users.

What are digital libraries, how should they be designed, how will they be used, and what relationship will they bear to what we now call “libraries”? Although we cannot hope to answer all these crucial questions in this short article, we do hope to encourage, and in some small measure to shape, the dialog among computer scientists, librarians, and other interested parties out of which answers may arise. Our contribution here is to make explicit, and to question, certain assumptions that underlie current digital library efforts. We will argue that current efforts are limited by a largely unexamined and unintended allegiance to an idealized view of what libraries have been, rather than what they actually are or could be. Since these limits come from current ways of thinking about the problem, rather than being inherent in the technology or in social practice, expanding our conception of digital libraries should serve to expand the scope and the utility of development efforts.