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Introduction
See also Instructor preparation for LIBR 1395
Origins of Digital Libraries
Required reading
Recommended reading
Discussion
When reading about Vannevar Bush, did you wonder why he is mentioned in articles about digital libraries? Arms (2000) says that Vannevar Bush is important because:
- He makes intelligent forecasts about the future of online libraries. This is amazing considering that his article was written ~65 years ago!
- He is writing about the potential of information technologies
- "Bush is often cited as the first person to articulate the new vision of a library, but that is incorrect. His article built on earlier work carried out in Germany before World War II. The importance of Bush lies in the wonderful exposition of the inter-relationship between information and scientific research, and in the latent potential of technology." Arms mentions Licklider's book about the future of libraries when memory cost $1/byte. What does it costs today? Well, if 1 megabyte = 1 048 576 bytes, and 512MB of RAM costs roughly $60, then each byte costs a fraction of a cent.
- Kochtanek TR, Kassim A, Hein KK. A digital library resource web site: Project DL. Online Information Rev. 2001;25(1):29-40.
Digital library timeline
- 1950’s and 60’s: microfilming
- Late 1960s: the indexing of legal and scientific documents in a full-text storage format. The Ohio Bar Automated Research (OBAR) System provided online access to legal statutes. (OBAR was a predecessor to LEXIS.) The Legal Information through Electronics (LITE) System, created by the US Air Force, indexed all of the US Code, information and legal interpretations regarding the disbursement of public funds
- 1970s: brought prewritten programs for computer-based storage, indexing, and retrieval of information
- Many technological advances during the 1980s led to the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web, which lead to formats for images and sound
- 1994: Library of Congress announces plans to create a National Digital Library (NDL). Collaborative effort to include other collections from other libraries and serve as integral part of the National Information Infrastructure
- 1994: the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced joint effort to support Digital Library research at six universities. This program, called the Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) provided over US$24 million in research awards to these six universities between 1994 and 1999
- Currently in phase two, the Digital Libraries Initiative-2 (DLI-2) program has awarded more than $44 million to research institutions. The focus has shifted from the DLI's emphasis on research, to DLI-2's emphasis which has been to support myriad different disciplines working in the digital library field
Why are digital libraries so popular now?
Arms (2000) says that digital libraries are increasingly important because:
- Electronic storage is very cheap
- Computer displays are more pleasant to use
- High speed networks are widespread
- Computers have become portable
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