Digital Library 2.0: Source of Knowledge and Research Collaboration Platform

Digital libraries are frequently treated just as a new method of storage of digitized artifacts, with all consequences of transferring long-established ways of dealing with physical objects into the digital world. Such attitude improves availability, but often neglects other opportunities offered by global and immediate access, virtuality and linking — as easy as never before. The article presents the idea of transforming a conventional digital library into knowledge source and research collaboration platform, facilitating content augmentation, interpretation and co-operation of geographically distributed researchers representing different academic fields. This concept has been verified by the process of extending descriptions stored in thematic Digital Library of Polish and Poland-related Ephemeral Prints from the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries with extended item-associated information provided by historians, philologists, librarians and computer scientists. It resulted in associating the customary fixed metadata and digitized content with historical comments, glossaries of foreign interjections or explanation of less-known background details.