Successes and Failures of Digital Libraries

Citation

Law, D. (2001), "Successes and Failures of Digital Libraries", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 3, pp. 146-159. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.3.146.5

In recent years there has been a certain element of smugness about views of digital library developments in higher education, a tendency to feel that the world can learn from us and that we are working at the leading edge of developments. This book is then a salutary and timely reminder that there are many others in the game and that they can produce excellent research and practice.

This is an edited volume of 11 papers from the 35th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing held at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana‐Champaign and much of it revolves round the DLI testbed for engineering journals set up at Illinois. The volume begins with a prosaic, factual account of the NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative by the Programme Director, Steve Griffin. Although baldly factual it is a useful paper, which creates a simple record – unlike the murky haze which surrounds pre‐ and post‐Follett digital library initiatives in the UK. Fox then provides a brief but comprehensively referenced update on the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, an international project in which UK involvement seems sadly lacking. Mischo and Cole follow with a description of the DLI Project at Urbana on a testbed for engineering journals sourced from a variety of publishers – the DeLIver Project. It has useful screen dumps of the interface. This is followed by a paper from Schutz et al. which describes a parallel study of user behaviour and reaction to the DeLIver Project and the feedback on the design this provides – a somewhat neglected area in the UK. Slightly confusingly, Neumann and Bishop then describe an apparently separate Social Science Team carrying out user studies on the same project. This is a noticeably lucid paper. Chen then offers a rather slighter paper on semantic interoperability and is followed by the ever interesting Wedgeworth, wearing his elder statesman hat and ruminating on some work he has done on transferring research results into commercial products. Ingoldsby, of the American Institute of Physics, then gives a publisher’s very positive view of the involvement of his company in the Illinois testbed. Hickey then gives an OCLC perspective on the problems of full text journals. Marshall then has possibly the best paper of the collection (worth the cost alone!) on the future of annotation in a digital world and the book then concludes with a meditation by David Levy on why we are creating digital libraries and what overarching concerns we should have.

This is an excellent volume. Only 18 months after the workshop some of the issues appear a little dated and the quality is inevitably variable. Many of the papers would have benefited from being longer and can often seem clipped. However, the avowed aim of the meeting was to look at failures and problems rather than to provide a litany of success and this is well and fully done in most cases. Bibliographies are generally extensive and tempting. Recommended.