If the term \digital library"" is unfamiliar to you, do not worry. It is a relatively new concept that many have never heard of. Essentially, it is a generic way of labeling a Web site or database that contains multimedia material intended for educational purposes. From there, a larger digital library will be searchable and frequently contain links to related online resources.
Digital library resources have a relatively long history at UW-Madison. Tom Murray, director of Wendt Library, spoke of how the early, strictly catalog-oriented resources grew into today's wide range of choices.
""UW-Madison campus libraries began offering electronic resources in the 1980s, starting with the online catalog [now called MadCat],"" Murray said. ""More than 10 years ago, we began to purchase or license commercial databases of journal articles ... In the early 1990s, we began cooperation among campus libraries in the networking and presentation of electronic resources including the journal article databases.""
Today's digital libraries are developed for a broad audience. Certainly, there are digital libraries intended specifically for neurologists and aerospace engineers. There are also, however, digital libraries containing music videos and stories for preschool children.
Public digital libraries emerged around the mid-1990s. Ten years ago, the Internet was used primarily by university and institute researchers to share information. Considering this, at six or seven years of age, digital libraries are comparatively quite young.
Developing a digital library frequently requires obtaining a large amount of funding, as well as collaboration between several universities, libraries or organizations. Many digital library home pages only contain ""test material"" or a description of the project, meaning it is not completed. The full process can take years.
Here are descriptions of some actual digital library projects.
The goal of this project is to digitize Colorado's state history, making it accessible to the general public through a collaboration of state archives, museums, libraries and historical societies. Still in development, the goal of the project is to post historical resources from texts to digitized music scores online. Many local archivists are working to incorporate city documents, cemetery records, photographic tours and oral histories into the project.
This is a very early project; a collaboration between Cornell University and Xerox Corporation. From 1990 to 1992, the two partners digitized many historical mathematics books. The collection includes such titles as ""A Brief History of Mathematics"" [""Geschichte de Elementar-mathematik""], by Karl Fink and ""Euclid and His Modern Rivals,"" by Lewis Carroll.
This is a particularly fascinating digitization project, as Columbia University's Starr East Asian Library is the only library outside of China to hold a nearly complete set of Ling Lung Women's Magazine. First published in Shanghai in 1931, Ling Lung contained articles on celebrities (both Chinese and Hollywood), fashion, psychology, love and sex. Although it sounds very much like today's fashion magazines, it was altogether new for Chinese women at the time.
All copies of Ling Lung held by the Starr East Asian Library are available online. The original copy's crumbling edges and yellowing paper, discernable in the digitized versions, are a testament to the importance of digital projects for the purpose of preservation.
UW-Madison has its own digital library projects as well, including the Digital Library for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture
and the Digital Asian Library.
The future looks bright for digital libraries, with many more resources yet to enter the online world and countless library users becoming more and more interested in using digital resources. John Leggett, director of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University, said that while new technologies are changing the faces of libraries, the essential concepts will remain the same.
""I think the intended users of digital libraries are the same as the intended users of physical libraries,"" Leggett said. ""I think we are just seeing a shift from physically based artifacts to digital artifacts, which is a naturally occurring event in the life of intellectual artifacts.""
Digital libraries, although still at a very early stage, are an exciting means of preserving and making available information to a wide public audience.
