Page 252 - DLIS007_LIBRARY AUTOMATION

Unit 13: Computerization in Information Services

13.4 The Virtual Library Notes

The vision of gathering all human knowledge together in one place is very old and has existed
in many civilizations.

Example: One example is the library of ancient Alexandria, and another the great
encyclopaedic enterprises in the Arabic, Chinese and European civilizations.
The aim is to achieve a total overview of the recorded knowledge, as with the Universal Decimal
Classification system, or by means of one large computer. Recently and due to the growth of the
Internet, this vision has manifested itself once again in the form of ‘the library without walls’, or
the virtual library.

The assumption is that everybody will obtain instant access to all recorded information in the
world through the nearest library. This phenomenon has been described in several ways, and
the term ‘electronic library’ has often been used. Unfortunately, this expression could equally
well mean a large database or further developments in library automation, or applications of
hypertext on the World Wide Web. The preferred term within the profession is the digital
library, which is not just a name for a collection of digitized media. First of all, the term refers
to a library, which is not necessarily in a particular building, but a systematic organization
where various professional operations, performed by a professional staff and directed towards
specific user groups, are carried out. The collection or parts of it might be digitized and access to
electronic and other networks provided. One of the most important items in the digital library
is metadata, which describe the contents and attributes of the library collection. They are important
to the process of searching among millions of documents.

The most prominent example here is the so-called ‘Dublin Core’ which defines fifteen core
elements to be used by authors as well as intermediaries. Another problem is naming, which
means strings of characters that uniquely define digital objects and therefore form a part of the
documents’ metadata. A system of naming must be permanent, and this means that a name
cannot be bound up with a specific location. The creation of such a naming or identifier system
is organizational, not technical, and different systems have been suggested. Examples are
Persistent User Requirement Languages (PURLs) developed by the On-line Computer Library
Centre (OCLC), where a server looks up the corresponding Uniform Resource Location (URL) in
a database; the Uniform Resource Name (URN) developed by the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) but still not in operation; and the Digital Object Identifier system (DOI) developed
by the Association of American Publishers and the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.
They all provide methods by which digital objects can be identified and accessed. Issues
concerning the management of the intellectual property right have given impetus to the
development of these systems.
National bibliographies are the cornerstones of the library system and they are facing many
problems with electronic documents. Such documents do not have a permanent existence, and a
hyper link may lead to an empty address. In principle, a similar problem can occur with printed
material, when a card catalogue refers to a document which has been lost or stolen. But the
problem takes on a completely new dimension on the Web because of the large number of
hyperlinks and the very transient nature of Web pages. A recent pilot project in Sweden aims at
testing methods of collecting, preserving and providing access to on-line electronic documents
in a way that allows them to be regarded as published. This is done by taking a ‘snapshot’ of the
relevant Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) pages, but concerns only static electronic
documents.

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