Digital Libraries: Policy, Planning and Practice

Citation

Bouchet, M. (2006), "Digital Libraries: Policy, Planning and Practice", Online Information Review, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 198-199. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520610659247

The editors state that this book aims to be a stimulating and informative handbook for library staff and information managers – an aim which it definitively achieves. There is very much a higher education focus to the content, but the projects described cover practices and issues that are relevant to all types of libraries.

The first two papers consist of retrospective and current overviews of US national digital library research programs and the UK eLib national strategy of digital library development. The book is then divided into two parts: the first part has five papers on policy and planning issues; the second, five papers on implementation and practice. The final part is a summing up, with an eye to future areas of innovation.

The first two papers include a brief history of developments from the mid‐1990s, clearly recalling the vast changes in the methods of library and information provision in the past decade (remember using gopher as a means of navigating information on the internet?), as well as reminding us that there will always be change, as IT innovation continues and user needs change.

The definition of a digital library from a 1997 Santa Fe workshop, quoted in the first paper, as “an environment to bring together collections, services and people in a full cycle of creation, dissemination, use and preservation activities”, seems the most meaningful of all attempted definitions. Some eight years later we are still trying to manage this environment. The papers in this collection enable the reader to grasp more fully the cycle incorporated in the definition, the issues involved and how we can contextualise them to the services we need to provide on a daily basis in our individual libraries.

The papers describe how the authors are managing a range of current thorny issues, how they have dealt with the theoretical frameworks and how this has worked out in practice. For example, “Building a digital library in 80 days” looks at these issues: standards, evaluation, preservation, legal issues, resource discovery etc.; considers how these affected the Glasgow Digital Library and how solutions were found, along with the lessons learned. Other papers focus in more detail on individual aspects, for example, preservation, digitisation, open access to journal articles.

A couple of worthwhile points to extract from the experiences of the authors are that the process can be as valuable as the results, and that e‐library services will not necessarily save money or space.

The papers, although describing primarily British projects, have been skilfully brought together by the editors to provide an interlocking picture of the digital library scene of relevance worldwide. It is clear to see that we have come a long and interesting way but that change and frustration still lie ahead.