From the Classical to Cloud-Based Era

A Library is an organized collection of resources made accessible to a defined community for reference or borrowing. It provides physical or digital access to material, and may be a physical building, or a virtual space, or both. During the last decays, the Libraries had witnessed a continuous revolution and still do. This paper reviews the main milestone of such revolution starting from the classical up to the current Cloud-based era passing by the intermediate digital transformation period. It reviews the library types, services, problems and drive of changes from the classical form. The paper then tackles the transformation of the library to the digital form. It discusses the characteristics of the digital library, the web-based library, and the library 2.0 through their advantages and limitations. The paper finally focuses on the current Cloud-based ear, where most of the library cloud platforms, services management, innovative products and opened environments are addressed through their features, add values, pros and cons. The paper also provides a comparative study on such solutions coming up with opened research issues. Hereby, the paper provides a comprehensive overview on the development of the library till now. Libraries: From the Classical to Cloud-Based Era