Digital Libraries, Documents, and Services

Talk given at Adobe Systems, August 7, 1996

What are libraries for?

The digital library is not a bounded, uniform collection of information, but an open-ended collection of services
There will be increasing diversity of information and service providers
There is more to using digital libraries than access and search

Sponsored by NSF, ARPA, NASA
6 Universities, each with industrial partners, publishers, information providers, and librarians
Each focused on a working testbed of materials and users
Cooperation with pre-existing and other related projects
Strong push towards interoperability

UC Berkeley : Media integration, interfaces
- (environmental information: hardcopy documents, photographs, maps, surveys, data,...)
UC Santa Barbara : Geographical information
- (maps, aerial photographs)
Carnegie Mellon : Multimedia, natural language, speech
- (science and news videos, with related materials)
Illinois : Integration, uniform access
- (science and engineering materials in SGML format)
Michigan : Economics, agents, education
- (earth and space science materials with K-12 focus)
Stanford : Interoperation, interfaces
- (computer science materials: primarily text, including WWW)

Users
- (student, researcher, experienced librarian)
Sources
- (bibliographic databases, on-line documents, WWW, databases,...)
Media and material structures
- (article, book, web page, data item, video clip, map, drawing, photo, advertisement, animation, ...)
Services
- (search, view, translate, publish, compare, rate, annotate, extract, collect, filter, index, archive, copy detect, visualize, notify, ...)
Platforms
- (Unix/X, Mac, Windows)

Support end-user tasks
Comprehensible model in domain of users
Extensible set of services - Smooth integration of services - Allow multiple services to be active
Persistence over various time scales
Sharing and reuse of DL expertise