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Unit 10: Digital and Virtual Libraries

Within a coordinated digital library scheme, some common standards will be needed to allow Notes
digital libraries to interoperate and share resources. The problem, however, is that across multiple
digital libraries, there is a wide diversity of different data structures, search engines, interfaces,
controlled vocabularies, document formats, and so on. Because of this diversity, federating all
digital libraries nationally or internationally would an impossible effort. Thus, the first task
would be to find sound reasons for federating particular digital libraries into one system.
Narrowing the field in such a manner would reduce the technical and political hurdles required
to establish common practices. Further, because of the often uncertain futures of both de jure and
de facto standards over time, what those standards are is unclear.

10.2.1 Metadata

Metadata is another issue central to the development of digital libraries. Metadata is the data
which describes the content and attributes of any particular item in a digital library. It is a
concept familiar to librarians because it is one of the primary things that librarians do—they
create cataloguing records that describe documents. Metadata is important in digital libraries
because it is the key to resource discovery and use of any document. Anyone who has used Alta
Vista, Excite, or any of the other search engines on the Internet knows that simple full-text
searches don’t scale in a large network. One can get thousands of hits, but most of them will be
irrelevant. While there are formal library standards for metadata, namely AACR, such records
are very time-consuming to create and require specially trained personnel. Human cataloguing,
though superior, is just too labour-extensive for the already large and rapidly expanding
information environment. Thus, simpler schemes for metadata are being proposed as solutions.
While they are still in their infancy, a number of schemes have emerged, the most prominent of
which is the Dublin Core, an effort to try and determine the “core” elements needed to describe
materials. The first workshop took place at OCLC headquarters in Dublin, Ohio, hence the name
“Dublin Core.” The Dublin Core workshops defined a set of fifteen metadata elements—much
simpler than those used in traditional library cataloguing. They were designed to be simple
enough to be used authors, but at the same time, descriptive enough to be useful in resource
discovery.

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Caution The lack of common metadata standards-ideally, defined for use in some specified
context-is yet another barrier to information access and use in a digital library, or in a
coordinated digital library scheme.

10.2.2 Naming, Identifiers and Persistence

This issue is related to metadata. It is the problem of naming in a digital library. Names are
strings that uniquely identify digital objects and are part of any document’s metadata. Names
are as important in a digital library as an ISBN number is in a traditional library. They are
needed to uniquely identify digital objects for purposes such as:

citations
information retrieval
to make links among objects
for the purposes of managing copyright
Any system of naming that is developed must be permanent, lasting indefinitely. This means,
among other things, that the name can’t be bound up with a specific location. The unique name
and its location must be separate. This is very much unlike URLs, the current method for

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