Two major themes continue to be a subject of discussion when dealing with digital libraries: how should the education programs in LIS (Library and Information Science) schools be changed or updated in order to provide the needed knowledge (skills ?) for librarians in the digital age and, closely related, how could the three major memory institutions (libraries, archives and museums) define comm...

Purpose – This paper sets out to address the issue of the impact and evolution of digital libraries and information services using the concept of information ecologies. Design/methodology/approach – After setting the perspective, digital libraries are explored from their functional logic inside the social subsystem that deals with transferring knowledge in the form of information among people a...

Electronic document standards such as TEI and METS provide the means to digitally encode sophisticated hierarchical document structures. This naturally leads to digital libraries using document structure to support user navigation, which can be particularly useful for large or complex documents that are studied closely by their readers, e.g. those found in large historical and literary source t...

For digital libraries to remain relevant in the new millennium where the ability to manage knowledge is critical, this paper explores how digital libraries could strategically be evolved into knowledge portals to encapsulate knowledge creation, management, sharing and reusability, features evidently lacking in most conventional digital libraries. Two digital library scenarios of use in educatio...

In this paper INDIGO, an approach to infrastructures for digital libraries is presented. It fulfills two crucial requirements to digital libraries: scalability and the ability to handle newly evolving document types. Based on a classification of digital library architectures, the main reasons for limited scalability and extensibility of digital libraries are identified. To overcome the identifi...

This paper presents a framework for evaluating the usability and effectiveness of digital libraries of various kinds. The framework consists of six attribute groupings (audience; institution; access; content; services; design and development). Each attribute grouping contains a number attributes expressed as continua, or dimensions. This framework allows us to think about digital libraries in a...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the findings of a survey promoted and financed by Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale about users’ perceptions of digital libraries in Italy. The primary objective of the survey was to obtain feedback from users on their perceptions of digital library services and to give them an opportunity to make suggestions. A secondary objective was to establ...

Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described as "thought in cold storage," and unfortunately many digital libraries can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of di...