Planning a Digital Library

Are you going to build a digital library? We hope so. And as with any complex system, it is wise to undergo a planning stage before immersing yourself in the detail. Table 1.1 shows some of the questions you should be asking.

Table 1.1: pertinent questions

You may not be able to answer them all immediately, but you will have to answer them all eventually. When you have read this topic you will be able to approach such questions with a solid understanding of the spectrum of possible answers and the implications of each one. Perhaps even more importantly, you will be able to reassess your answers when technology changes. This is what it means to understand the field of digital libraries.

The questions are divided into three categories: users, materials, and technology. Despite this neat structure, however, the issues are complex and resist any simple categorization. For example, choosing a suitable format for presenting material to users requires an understanding of:

• the background of the users and the technology they use for access;

• the original format of the material and whether it needs to be converted before presentation;

• technological options for conversion;

• the possibilities for information loss during conversion;

• resourcing requirements for conversion.

The issues are strongly interconnected, there are many trade-offs, and each collection has its own idiosyncrasies. Moreover, computer-based systems change extremely rapidly—in so-called Internet-time—and particular ways of resolving issues in Table 1.1 will likely soon be out of date.

This topic proceeds in roughly the same way as Table 1.1. Topic 2 focuses on the people in digital libraries. The most important people are the users (customers, if you like) and the questions about users in Table 1.1 are much harder to answer for digital libraries than for traditional ones. Topic 3 concerns the user experience: What might the final digital library system look like? We examine different kinds of documents and how they can be presented, multimedia as well as text, and document surrogates as well as full documents. We also consider how users access the library, and how they experience the fundamental operations of searching and browsing.

The following three topics concern the second block of Table 1.1: the material in digital libraries. Topics 4 and 5 discuss the form of the source documents, the raw ingredients for the library. A major question in practice is whether material will be obtained from physical documents, such as books and journals, and topic 4 includes an extensive section on scanning and optical character recognition (the technology for producing electronic text from scanned pages). This can be a costly process, particularly if high accuracy is needed, which makes questions about resourcing the conversion particularly pertinent and concerns about the cost trade-offs particularly acute. In many digital collections, electronic conversion is by far the major cost. Another potential expense is adding value to the contents by providing metadata, including enhanced descriptions of each item. Metadata effectively binds the raw ingredients into a coherent form: Topic 6 discusses its shape and form, and explores the role it plays bringing order and organization to a library.

The third block of Table 1.1 is technology. The nitty-gritty details of implementation are given in Part II of this book. However, topic 7 introduces a wider set of technological issues, including the protocols and services that aid interoperability. The last three questions in Table 1.1 concern risk management in an unpredictable technological environment. What if circumstances change? Through no fault of your own, software and implementation strategies you choose today may turn out badly tomorrow. If circumstances change and you wish to migrate the library to another system, you will want to preserve the investments you have made—another aspect of interoperability. Topic 8 looks at the global challenges of internationalization, which are both human and technological—recall the example of the alphabet used when searching for Sophocles. Topic 9, which concludes Part I, presents visions of digital libraries past, present, and future, and highlights the difficulty of long-term preservation.

Resource considerations plague almost every endeavor in life, and libraries are no exception. Several of the questions in Table 1.1 ask about the resources required for different parts of the process. Our own experience is that the decision-makers who control resources are often tremendously impressed if they see a prototype of the digital library. Somehow, when it’s their own material or material that they have a stake in, even a small, rough-hewn demo can prove inspirational—and attract funding. It’s usually very worthwhile to obtain a small sample of the material and build it into a small prototype that you can show to people in a position to argue for resources to support a major effort. Think big—but, in the first instance, act small. The important thing is to act.