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Defining a digital library

Article in Library Hi Tech · June 2007

DOI: 10.1108/07378830710754938

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EDITORIAL Editorial

Defining a digital library

Michael Seadle and Elke Greifeneder
Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany 169
Abstract
Received 15 March 2007
Purpose – This editorial seeks to examine the definition of a “digital library” to see whether one can
Revised 18 March 2007
be constructed that usefully distinguishes a digital library from other types of electronic resources. Accepted 18 March 2007
Design/methodology/approach – The primary methodology compares definitions from multiple
settings, including formal institutional settings, working definitions from articles, and a synthesis
created in a seminar at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Findings – At this point, digital libraries are evolving too fast for any lasting definition. Definitions
that users readily understand are too broad and imprecise, and definitions with more technical
precision quickly grow too obscure for common use.
Originality/value – A functional definition of a digital library would add clarity to a burgeoning
field, especially when trying to evaluate a resource. The student perspective provides a fresh look at
the problem.
Keywords Digital libraries, Electronic media, Internet, Germany
Paper type Viewpoint

Introduction
Teaching a combined lecture/seminar series on digital libraries seemed like an obvious
priority for a newly hatched “Professor for Digital Libraries” and coming up with a
definition was one way to justify selection of the various digital library examples.
Several sample definitions came to mind from various US funding agencies. The
National Science Foundation (NSF) has this explanation on its web site for the Digital
Library Initiative projects:
Digital Libraries basically store materials in electronic format and manipulate large
collections of those materials effectively. Research into digital libraries is research into
network information systems, concentrating on how to develop the necessary infrastructure
to effectively mass-manipulate the information on the Net (NSF, 1999).
The problem with this definition was the weight it put on purely technical aspects.
Since the lecture and seminar also emphasized the use of anthropological methods, the
definition needed to include the human context.
It also seemed important to reassure students and colleagues that the Institute was
not merely becoming a light-weight computer-science establishment. The broad
concept of digital libraries implicit in the National Leadership Grants program of the
Institute of Museum and Library Services fits this purpose:
The Digital Revolution has affected nearly every aspect of library and museum services, from
the automation of internal recordkeeping systems to the digitization of physical collections,
Library Hi Tech
and from the acquisition of new “born-digital” works of art or library publications to the use Vol. 25 No. 2, 2007
of technology to present collections and engage audiences. pp. 169-173
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Digital technology enables the full range of holdings in our museums, libraries, and 0737-8831
archives – audio, video, print, photographs, artworks, artifacts, and other resources – to be DOI 10.1108/07378830710754938
LHT cataloged, organized, combined in new ways, and made accessible to audiences in new ways.
. . . Digital technology connects more people to the resources and services that only museums
25,2 and libraries can provide (IMLS, 2005).

Definition
170 The definition used initially for the classes rested heavily on the IMLS model and also
aimed to reaffirm the connection between digital and traditional bricks-and-mortar
libraries with predominantly paper collections:
A “digital library” is fundamentally a resource that reconstructs the intellectual substance
and services of a traditional library in digital form.
Digital libraries consist of digital contents (which are sometimes but not necessarily
text-based), interconnections (which may be simple links or complex metadata or
query-based relationships), and software (which may be simple pages in HTML or
complex database management systems). A single, simple, stand-alone web page is probably
not a digital library in any meaningful sense, any more than a single page or a single book is a
traditional library. A mass of raw data such as comes from the Hubble telescope is probably
also not a digital library, though its contents arguably belongs in one.
Digital libraries are not replacements for traditional libraries. They are rather the future of
traditional libraries, much as medieval manuscript libraries simply became a specialized and
much revered part of the larger print-based libraries that we have today (Seadle, 2006).
This definition lacked precision in a number of areas that continued to make it hard to
determine whether a particular resource was a “genuine” digital library. The students
continued to ask a number of intelligent questions about what digital libraries really
were. The questions were less about what a digital library is than what it is not? Using
this definition, Google Scholar or even Wikipedia could be considered a digital library.
Especially in Germany, the types of projects that are called digital libraries are very
broad and varies from a hyperlink-list to pure holdings digitization. “Digital” is a
buzzword whose meaning few professionals care about precisely. An interesting
question is what is included semantically in this concept. In its Latin origin digital
means, “finger” and this meaning persists in medical fields. For a health professional a
digital library could be a “finger” library! The above definition further predicts that
digital library content is in digital form. But “digital form” is ambiguous. For the
students it was not clear whether digital referred to the data type – i.e. an electronic
format – or to the environment – i.e the internet.
This classroom dialogue led to the exploration of how others defined digital libraries:
The digital library is not a single entity; The digital library requires technology to link the
resources of many services that are transparent to the end users; Universal access to digital
libraries and information services is a goal; Digital library collections are not limited to
document surrogates: they extend to digital artefacts that cannot be represented or
distributed in printed formats (ARL, 1995).
The digital library is the collection of services and the collection of information objects that
support users in dealing with information objects available directly or indirectly via
electronic/digital means (Leiner, 1998).
A managed collection of information, with associated services, where the information is
stored in digital formats and accessible over a network (Arms, 2000).
What these definitions have in common is the repeated emphasis on access to services Editorial
and on content, which is sometimes called collections or documents or information or
information objects. What they did not do was to provide sharper criteria for deciding
whether, say, JSTOR was a digital library, or merely a valuable resource within a
digital library collection.
Further discussions with colleagues at the International Conference on Digital
Libraries in New Dehli (December 2006) and at the American Library Association 171
Midwinter meeting in Seattle (January 2007) produced a rich variety of input for
discussion, but nothing definitive. A digital library turned out, like many dynamic
social organisms, to be hard to pin down.

A synthesis of definitions
The students in the seminar broke into groups to make their own attempt at
synthesizing these definitions and describing the nature of a digital library. This was
not easy.
The students had seen so many projects being called digital libraries that they
first tried to include all the various attributes from the projects in one definition.
But this did not make any sense, because it became so broad that a digital library
became anything in electronic format. In a second step the students tried to build
up a definition with their idea what a digital library should be. They started with
comparisons, for example a digital library is not an online book store like Amazon,
it is not software and it is not an online catalogue from a traditional library. But
then they recognized the difficulty of extracting positive attributes out of this
antonym-based analysis. It was a challenge to find words to express what a digital
library really should be, and it took courage to argue that resource that called itself
a digital library really was not one. In the end, they realized that they could either
write a relatively imprecise definition that most people could understand or they
could fashion a well-crafted one with specific terminology that needed an
explanation to be applied.
Here are the definitions the students developed:
Eine Digitale Bibliothek basiert auf in digitaler Form vorliegenden Dokumenten, die gemäß
der traditionellen bibliothekarischen Aufgaben (Sammeln, Erschließen, Verfügbarmachen)
bearbeitet und deren so erstellte Katalogisate für Nutzer online zugänglich gemacht werden
(Group 1).
A digital library is based on documents in digital form that are handled like traditional
library documents in standard processes (collecting, cataloging, and providing access) and
that are made available online for users via catalog records (our translation).
Eine Digitale Bibliothek ist ein elektronisches Produkt einer Software, das sowohl
Primärdaten als auch manuell erstellte bzw. geprüfte Metadaten beinhaltet. Die Primärdaten
können sowohl thematisch oder bestandsabhängig sein, müssen jedoch ständig gepflegt
werden. Eine Digitale Bibliothek beinhaltet des Weiteren die drei Hauptfunktionen einer
herkömmlichen Bibliothek: Erschließung, Langzeitarchivierung und Verfügbarmachung
(Group 2).
A digital library is an electronic product of software that contains both primary data and
manually created or manually proofed metadata. The primary data can be either thematic or
collections-based and must constantly be maintained. A digital library also includes the three
LHT main functions of a traditional library: cataloging, long-term archiving, and access (our
translation).
25,2
Eine Digitale Bibliothek ist die elektronische Bereitstellung digitaler Dokumente in
Verbindung mit Onlinedienstleistungen, aufbauend auf den Aufgaben einer traditionellen
Bibliothek, die den weltweiten Zugriff auf deren Bestand via internet ermöglicht (Group 3).

172 A digital library is the electronic provision of digital documents in connection with online
services, building on the tasks of a traditional library, which enables worldwide access to its
collection via the internet (our translation).
The definition from Group two is particularly interesting because it broadens the
content from documents to data of all types. It also insists on the value of humanly
created or at least humanly examined metadata, instead of purely machine-generated
indexes, and it includes archiving as one of the defining aspects of a digital library. All
three definitions emphasize the continuity with traditional library work, and two of the
three require internet access.

Conclusion
Digital libraries are in fact probably too young to define in any permanent way, but
how we think about them will have a great deal to do with how future generations of
librarians conceptualize their mission in the digital world. A digital library build in the
image of the NSF definition for the Digital Library Initiative projects may turn out to
be a technological marvel, but if it fails to organize meaningful collections or to provide
access to information intelligible to end-users, it fails to meet key tests in the student
definitions. More importantly, if digital libraries fail to carry out that vital mission to
preserve information resources for future generations, they fail in an historically
well-recognized task for all major research libraries.
Student definitions are not, of course, quite the same as the carefully-weighed
utterances of active scholars and professionals. But these students see the problems
with fresh eyes and live in the digital world. We who have spent years building up
digital library resources may be too close to our own modest works to put them in
perspective or even to know what we have (or have not) created.

References
Arms, W.Y. (2000), Digital Libraries, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Association of Research Libraries (1995), “Definition and purposes of a digital library”, available
at: www.arl.org/sunsite/definition.html
Institute of Museum and Library Services (2005), National Initiatives: Digital Corner, US Federal
Government, available at: www.imls.gov/about/digitalcorner.asp
Leiner, B.M. (1998), “The NCSTRL approach to open architecture for the confederated digital
library”, D-Lib Magazine, available at: www.dlib.org/dlib/december98/leiner/12leiner.
html
National Science Foundation (1999), Digital Libraries Initiative: Available Research, US Federal
Government, available at: http://dli2.nsf.gov/dlione/
Seadle, M. (2006), “Lecture”, 23 October.
Further reading Editorial
Arms, C.R. (1996), “Historical collections for the national digital library: lessons and challenges at
the Library of Congress”, D-Lib Magazine, April, available at: www.dlib.org/dlib/april96/
loc/04c-arms.html

About the authors

Michael Seadle is Editor of Library Hi Tech and Professor at the Institute for Library and 173
Information Sciences at Humboldt University in Berlin. Michael Seadle is the corresponding
author and can be contacted at: [email protected]
Elke Greifeneder is a Master’s student at the Institute for Library and Information Sciences at
Humboldt University in Berlin and is also Editorial Assistant for Library Hi Tech.

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