Reference services have taken a central place in library and information services. They are also regarded as personalised services since in most cases a personal discussion takes place between a user and a reference librarian. Based on this, the librarian points to the sources that are considered to be most appropriate to meet the specific information need(s) of the user. Since the Web and digi...

While methods for searching large digital libraries have experienced tremendous improvements recently, interfaces to such collections still have a far way to go. Most interfaces to digital libraries present themselves as various forms of sorted lists, providing metadata information on the documents in textual form. This prohibits intuitive understanding of document archives or web search result...

A brief overview is presented of some challenges that science and technology libraries have to face, caused by the evolution from classical libraries towards more electronic and digital libraries. This is a consequence of the fast evolution in information and communication technology (ICT) that has lead to more applications of ICT, not only to manage classical libraries, but also to create, dis...

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 mak...

• Digital libraries' roots can be traced back to 1965 when Libraries of the Future by J. C. R. Licklider was beginning to imagine a world of broad access to knowledge. • Automated machines that run behind the scenes at digital libraries came into existence in the 1960s. • You could call Lexis-Nexis a digital library which emerged in the mid-1980s. • However, what most would call a "digital libr...

Currently, there exist a large number of superb digital libraries, all of which are, unfortunately, vertically integrated and all presenting a monolithic interface to their users. Ideally, a user would want to locate resources from a variety of digital libraries dealing only with one interface. A number of approaches exist to this interoperability issue exist including: defining a universal pro...