Digital libraries store large amounts of documents of any media type and format. Due to the fast development of information technology new media types and document formats will have to be integrated into existing digital libraries. We propose an infrastructure that supports the extensibility of digital libraries by new document types. A prototype has been implemented to proof the feasibility of...

The Development of digital libraries in Poland started around 10 years ago. The first Polish digital librarywasthe Digital Library of Wielkopolska made available publicly in October 2002. It is now the largest Polish digital library,givingaccess to over 130,000 digital objects. One of the keys to the success of this initiative was its organizational model based on regional cooperation. Since 20...

Although a vast amount of information about the environment can be found in various locations around the globe, difficulty has been expressed in gathering and organizing such information. The role of Web-based digital libraries in this case is to provide a common framework for the management of such information. A digital library of environment-specific data can be defined as a unified entity, ...

Candy Schwartz is Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, 300 The Fenway, Boston, Massachusetts 02115-5898 ,[email protected].. I t is an understatement to say that the phrase “digital library” (DL) means different things to different people. As part of a class project, students in a digital library course recently found 64 different formal...

There has been a recent explosion of interest in digital music libraries. In particular, interactive melody retrieval is a striking example of a search paradigm that differs radically from the standard full-text search. Many different techniques have been proposed for melody matching, but the area lacks standard databases that allow them to be compared on common grounds—and copyright issues hav...

This chapter presents the services and functionality that a personal digital library (PDL) system should provide. The chapter includes a reference architecture for supporting the characteristics and functionality of the personal digital library. In particular, a currently available project called PDLib is used as an example of this type of system. The authors address some of the particular prob...

Digital Libraries are evolving rapidly with the usage of Internet and WWW technologies. Since the digital libraries are running on the Internet and the users are from various psychological, educational and social backgrounds, the usage of digital libraries is varying from user to user which entail the need of best user interface. In order to design usable and useful interactive systems, designe...

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The initial efforts to standardize and facilitate searching of digital libraries date back to the 1970s, when the development of the Z39.50 protocol started. The Z39.50 protocol is an ANSI standard and defines how to search and retrieve items from a remote database catalog. The Z39.50 protocol was widely deployed within library environments, allowing users to perform searc...

Publications such as consumer magazines rely heavily on image libraries as sources for the images they publish in their issues. Traditionally, magazine staff discuss their image requirements over the telephone with library staff and the library conducts the search. Many libraries have now developed Web sites allowing their customers to search for images themselves. However this survey found tha...