The Digital Library on Campus: A Perspective from a UK Academic Environment

Abstract

Whichever definition you wish to employ, the age of the digital library is upon us. There is much theoretical discussion about the nature of the digital library, but whatever form it comes to assume in the future, its foundations are surely being laid now. It is often remarked that there will be no place in it for librarians who will be displaced from the world of information to become merely curators of book museums. But this is not the experience of this librarian who i s hearing more loudly now than ever before, demands from our users for information in digital form and an insistence that libraries should be exploiting IT on their behalf. To the academic community, we have been traditionally the gatekeepers to the world of information. They now see us as being effectively the purse-holders for information, and they are looking first to us to provide the information services they need for teaching and research.The Follett Report published in 1993, has had a tremendous influence in the UK in this respect. Its recommendations have led directly to the release of funds specifically for libraries which has provided a window of opportunity for institutions wishing to collaborate in digitization projects. The author discusses briefly some of those in which Oxford is closely involved.Many forces have contributed to the new expectations of the library profession, but of perhaps most significance has been the accelerating growth of high bandwidth networks and internet connectivity. At last it is becoming feasible for libraries to consider tackling the problems of the information explosion and shrinking budgets, by moving truly from 'holdings to 'access' policies. There is also the demand that our information services should reach beyond library buildings to the users' desktops on campus and at home. As a practicing digital librarian who has had to grapple with the technicalities of providing integrated and ubiquitous information systems in the real virtual world, certain difficulties have become apparent which are common to most UK academic establishments and, I suspect, to those in Europe, the US and India too.With respect to accessing quality CD-ROM and magnetic databases, mounted logicaly or remotely, the SilverPlatter ERL system has provided us with a powerful mechanism, especially with the development of WebSPIRS, which allows access to databases from standard WWW browsers, and provides support for Z39.50, which will allow access from Z39.50 clients.The WWW has achieved a high integration of internet sources and we are using it for many applications. But it has inherent limitations, in particular, the 'stateless' nature of the http protocol and the semantic poverty of HTML. We shall examine these issues in the light of new ,standards and technologies that are emerging, in particular, the IETF's work on Uniform Resource Identifiers, the Text Encoding Initiative and Sun's JAVA programming language.

http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dbit.17.6.3241