Where Do We Go From Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries

• Digital libraries' roots can be traced back to 1965 when Libraries of the Future by J. C. R. Licklider was beginning to imagine a world of broad access to knowledge. • Automated machines that run behind the scenes at digital libraries came into existence in the 1960s. • You could call Lexis-Nexis a digital library which emerged in the mid-1980s. • However, what most would call a "digital library" didn't spring into popular thought till the mid 1990s when the Internet really became available for many people. • The 1994-2004 period is characterized by major programmatic funding from the U.S. government (and around the world too!). o Major sources of funding: • Digital Libraries Initiative • DLI-2 o This led to academic research in the field of digital libraries which legitimized them and got the attention of the public. o Several organizations got together to push for an inclusive, international effort to pool resources, knowledge, and experience to create digital libraries. o Funding has pretty much discontinued from the U.S. government (the economy, the research had mostly been completed). o A digital library community however remains firmly in place. • They appeal to other sources for funding. • The goal now is to find other areas to work in such as the production systems where digital libraries can handle massive amounts of data that needs to be shared and used between various parties. • Academic community also relies heavily on digital library technology (digital asset management, digital collection creation and management, institutional repositories). • The use of digital libraries is that they offer many tools which can be utilized in many areas. • We need to do more research in how to preserve data and for how long. o Various agencies and stakeholders need to be involved in this! • Upcoming areas of interest: o Personal information management as more of our activities are captured. o "Long term relationships between humans and information collections and systems. This is related to personal information management, but also considers evolutionary characteristics of behavior, systems that learn, personalization, system to system migration across generations of technologies, and similar questions. This is connected to human-computer interface studies and also to studies of how individuals and groups seek, discover, use and share information, but goes beyond the typical concerns of both to take a very long time horizon perspective." o How can information services and …