Information and reference services are one major component of library services. This article attempts to describe the paradigm of information and reference services in the digital library. Based on the fact that automatic digital library technologies are solving more and more information needs and changing the mode of user service, the authors suggest a three-levelled system that supports users...

74 Computer A s the capabilities of distributed digital libraries increase, managing organizational and software complexity becomes a key issue. How can collections and indexes be updated without impacting queries currently in progress? When users can communicate with the system in different natural languages, how can software cope with the display of various versions of text? With multimedia c...

Digital libraries involve various types of data like text, audio , images and video. The data objects are typically very large and of the order of hundreds and thousands of kilobytes. In a digital library, these data objects are distributed in a wide area network. Retrieving large data objects in a wide area network has a high response time. We have conducted experiments to measure the communic...

The document is a powerful entity of importance in many areas of information processing. Within areas such as electronic publishing, hypertext, and even software specification, the document represents a meaningful, moderately-sized unit of information, and serves as a useful abstraction in defining many kinds of manipulation operations. The components of a document can be assumed to be interrel...

AELSTRACT THEPHRASE ‘‘LEARNING AND THE DIGITAL LIBRARY‘‘ encompasses two distinct components: learning related to accessing, evaluating, and using the information resources available in this environment and learning related to mastering and building upon the ideas embodied within those individual resources. Educators and system designers must draw upon research, theory, and practice from fields...

Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 1 System Description .............................................................................................................................. 1 User Interface .....................................................................................