The Role of Digital Libraries in Higher Education

Digital libraries are quite new – about 20 years of age. At the same time, they have been growing at a fast pace. Digital libraries have the following characteristics – they store, preserve, distribute and protect contents in different formats and, at the same time, they allow interaction between the user and the contents; they are always present, both geographically and over time; they can make works internationally known, enhancing referencing and citations; they can make public the products of the educational process and let them be used as inputs for further learning. This work addresses some aspects of digital libraries that make them suitable tools to support higher education. Examples are presented. Index Terms – Citations, digital libraries, electronic theses and dissertations, higher education, open access. INTRODUCTION – A LITTLE ABOUT DIGITAL LIBRARIES Digital library projects started in the early 1990s. One of the first projects was Vatican Library Accessible Worldwide – a partnership of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and IBM (Brazil, Italy and USA). The items to be digitized were selected from the manuscript and rare book collections. The prototype server was first tested in July 1995. Mintzer et al [1] presented some results of the project in 1996. Another, at about the same time, was Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) – a project of the University of California, Santa Barbara. It began in 1995 and the digital items are geographically referenced materials. Unlike the Vatican Project, ADL is still operative and information about it can be obtained from the What is ADL? item of the project website [2]. Both projects involved universities but none focused on materials created either by faculty or by students. They aimed at making available collections of very specific items that were produced outside the higher education process. Almost at the same time, in 1993, at Virginia Tech – Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University [3], the first electronic theses and dissertations were ready to be published [4] following an initiative of the graduate programs. After these early activities, a lot has happened in the areas of digital libraries, digital publishing and networking of electronic educational and cultural resources. Side by side with the advancements came a set of challenges, two of them are intellectual property rights in the digital and networked arena, and digital preservation, an ever growing concern as collections migrate to digital formats and traditional versions are discarded. In this world of fast change, digital libraries offer many facilities to education in general and to higher education in particular. This work addresses some of the roles of digital libraries in higher education; comparisons to traditional libraries are also presented. The following section is devoted to each of them. The third section addresses the two challenges – intellectual property rights and digital preservation – for the use of digital libraries in this context. The last section comments on the importance of digital libraries and its networks for higher education. DIGITAL LIBRARIES AND HIGHER EDUCATION Over the centuries, libraries have been the keepers and distributors of books, journals, maps and other materials that are used by students in the learning process. They have also been the legal deposit of part of the products of scholarly publications – theses & dissertations, articles, technical reports, etc. In general, students have been patrons of the libraries of their institutions. In order to make more contents available and thus benefit students and faculty, pools of institutions have engaged in commuting items and/or their copies. There is no reason for digital libraries not to have the same functions of traditional libraries, except that they can add functions and value due to their digital and networked nature. Let the different functions of a digital library in the higher education context be examined. Digital Libraries and Courseware Books and traditional items have been kept and distributed by the university libraries. On the other hand, class notes, simulators, spread sheets and other materials created by faculty have traditionally been made available by their authors through copies in an informal distribution situation. The use of ICT – Information and Communication tools has changed the informal distribution to computer and networked based solutions. As consequence, a great amount of contents became available from computers lacking the necessary identification and access control. Identification (description of the digital contents) is important for the search and retrieve actions by users.