Digital Libraries and Their Challenges

Library Trends, Fall, 2000 by Daniel Greenstein

ABSTRACT

THIS ARTICLE DERIVES FROM A REVIEW OF KEY CHALLENGES confronted by libraries that are actively investing in online collections and services. Conducted in the first instance to help refine the programmatic goals of the Digital Library Federation (DLF), it took account of the digital library developments, successes, needs, and challenges perceived by professionals working at the DLF's twenty-four member libraries.(1) Methodologically, the review relied on two research tracks. The first involved desk-based research into the strategic documentation and technical reports that inform members' work in this area. The second involved extensive discussions convened at some twenty-seven sites.(2)

After a brief summary of some key findings related to the digital library--definitions of the digital library are possibly premature and will underrepresent the extent to which its activities are shaped by local institutional, legal, and business imperatives--this article reviews five key challenges offering some thoughts about how each may be confronted in the future.

INTRODUCTION

The digital library extends the breadth and scale of scholarly and cultural evidence and supports innovative research and lifelong learning. To do this, it mediates between diverse and distributed information resources on the one hand and a changing range of user communities on the other. In this capacity, it establishes "a digital library service environment"--that is, a networked online information space in which users can discover, locate, acquire access to and, increasingly, use information. Although access paths will vary depending on the resource in question, the digital library service environment makes no distinctions among information formats. Books, journals, paper-based archives, video, film, and sound recordings are as visible in the digital library service environment as are online catalogs, finding aids, abstracting and indexing services, e-journal and e-print services, digitized collections, geographic information systems, Internet resources, and other "electronic" holdings.

In constructing a digital library service environment, the library becomes responsible for configuring access to a world of information of which it owns or manages only a part. Accordingly, the digital library is known less for the extent and nature of the collections it owns than for the networked information space it defines through its online services. In the world of commercial publishing, aggregators compete on the basis of the value-added services that they layer on top of overlapping electronic collections. Similarly, digital libraries establish their distinctive identities, serve their user communities, emphasize their owned collections, and promote their unique institutional objectives by the way in which they disclose, provide access to, and support the use of their increasingly virtual collections.

The digital library service environment is not simply about access to, and use of, information. It also supports the full range of administrative, business, and curatorial functions required by the library to manage, administer, monitor engagement with, and ensure fair use of its collections whether in digital or non-digital formats, whether located locally or off site. The digital library service environment integrates (and interfaces with) information repositories that are characterized by open-access shelving, high-density book stores, and availability via interlibrary loan, and include data services and digital archival repositories. It manages information about collections and items within collections often throughout their entire life cycle. It incorporates patron, lending, and other databases, and integrates appropriate procedures for user registration, authentication, authorization, and fee-transaction processing. The distal library service environment may also evolve into a networked learning space, providing access to, and a curatorial home for, distance and lifelong learning materials. The digital library service environment is, in sum, an electronic information space that supports very different views and very different uses of the library. It is designed for the library's patrons as well as for its professional staff and with an eye on the needs and capacities of those who supply it with information content and systems. It is built in the full knowledge that information technologies will continue to change rapidly as will our understanding of how they can be used to support education and cultural engagement. Finally, it is evolving as the library's defining function and as such is developed with a view to its financial and organizational sustainability.

ARCHITECTURAL AND SYSTEMS CHALLENGES

The digital library typically relies on a narrow base of appropriately skilled professionals to keep abreast of the rapid pace of technical change while maintaining, indeed extending, robust and fully operational online services and collections.(3) In both respects, it is stretched beyond capacity with evident deleterious effect. Lacking the resources to develop core systems components (e.g., search and retrieval tools, user interfaces and user profiling services, user authentication and authorization services) that work across individual collections and services, the digital library adopts a tendency toward a more ad hoc approach that meets the most pressing demands involving development work.(4) Although viable in the short term, the strategy threatens severely to undermine a position over which the library exerts only a tenuous hold--that of the trusted provider of high-quality information services.(5) Where pure research and development activities are concerned, the rate and pace of technical change diminishes the time between the identification of a potentially valuable new technology and its deployment in a digital library service environment while the risks and costs associated with any decision to deploy a new technology remain stable or increase. Accordingly, libraries are investing in more technologies, more often, and with less information than at any time in the past.