Dewey goes digital: as campus Internet technologies enter the next millennium, schools rush to move their libraries online. Is this finally the end of the card catalog? - Digital Libraries

University Business, June, 2003 by Matt Villano

When author and renowned flugelhorn soloist Richard Sudhalter set out in 2000 to write a book about jazz legend Hoagy Carmichael, he hit the Internet for archived recordings and came upon an unlikely source: Indiana University.

Earlier that year, as part of a library sciences effort called "Variations," Indiana technologists had digitized thousands of Carmichael recordings from the 1920s and '30s and archived them online. Unbeknownst to Sudhalter, the archive comprised the largest digital music library online outside of Napster.

Sudhalter's discovery posed no problems at all. With proper provisions from university administrators, he was able to log on to the campus network in Bloomington, search the database electronically, and research his entire book online--all without leaving his office 1,000 miles away in Long Island, NY.

"Maybe we saw him once during the whole process," says Kristine Brancolini, who heads the music library and also serves as director of Indiana's digital library program as a whole. "With all of the material he needed there in front of him, our archive made his research easy."

Sudhalter is not alone; all over the country, researchers and university affiliates alike are beginning to understand the power and convenience of digital libraries. Once described as "fantasy" projects for library science professionals, digital libraries now are seen as critical to the long-term survival of data. Just like traditional libraries with physical shelves and tangible books, these electronic archives contain everything from text to data, audio, video, images, and--in the case of Indiana's archive--music. The difference, of course, lies in the medium: Everything in a digital library is, well, digital, meaning university affiliates can access data anytime from just about any place with a sophisticated computer and a secure Internet connection.

While this technology isn't ready to replace the card catalog just yet, experts agree that the applications for content in these libraries are unbounded. Already, a handful of colleges and universities have digitized bodies of rare information that would have remained off-limits without the technology to copy it electronically. At other schools, researchers are exploring ways to build archives of digitized three-dimensional content--data previously experienced only by human contact or laboratory work. Still, the move to digitize is not without obstacles. For every advance, it seems, researchers must recover from another pratfall, necessitating steady development and, naturally, a cartload of patience.

"Despite all the strides we've made, in many regards, digital libraries are still in their infancy," says Steve Griffin, program director of the Digital Libraries Initiative at the National Science Foundation (NSF; www.nsf.gov). "We know how we'd like them to work eventually, but between here and there, the libraries themselves still have quite a bit of life to live."

THE MOVING TARGET

The digital library movement has been gaining momentum gradually for years, ever since the first effort launched in the late 1980s. That was when the NSF and the national Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded six "test bed" sites for digital-archiving projects of varying sizes and scopes: the University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Most of these early projects focused on the digitization of text; in many cases, the projects are still going strong.

In the early days, if a researcher could demonstrate a new and innovative way to digitize content, that researcher's project was considered a success almost regardless of the outcome. Over the years, however, as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanning technology empowered librarians to scan multiple documents at a time, the nature of what made a good and successful library digitization project changed dramatically. Technicians at large projects such as the University of California's California Digital Library project (www.cdlib.org) digitized hundreds of documents each day, and suddenly, expectations soared virtually overnight.

That was only the beginning. As the fundamental technologies of digitization became even more sophisticated, digital library projects were no longer considered successful unless they succeeded in effectively delivering digitized content to a targeted community of users. Digital content became nothing without context, and according to Tim Cole, mathematics librarian and associate professor of library Administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, this shift in focus facilitated the integration of digitized information resources with more traditional collections, leading directly to the development of sophisticated stand-alone digital archives.

"The pioneering institutions were forced to redefine success almost every step of the way," Cole says, noting that perhaps their biggest accomplishment was collaborating to supply formative data for the NSF-funded national science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education digital library (NSDL; nsdl.org). "In the process, the definition of digital library evolved as well."