Digital Libraries

Ashley Tipton Digital Libraries Introduction A simple definition of a digital library is a library where collections are stored in digital formats instead of physical formats and accessible via computers. The content can then be accessed locally, as in within a library, or remotely such as from other places on a college campus or from a user's home. Many people believe that digital libraries are the future. There are also those that still hold on to the thought that the traditional brick and mortar building is the way a library is supposed to be and that moving to the digital real is not the direction a library should be heading. History The information revolution is one of the marvels of the 20th century. We are now living in an information society where almost everyone around us has a computer, a smartphone, and is connected to the Internet. As our society has become more and more connected, libraries have also started to become more digitized. Library automation came into popularity in the early 1950s. It started with punched card applications to library technical services operations. In 1965, Licklider coined the phrase “library of the future” to refer to his vision of a fully computer-based library and then in 1978, F.W. Lancaster wrote of the “paperless library” (Harter, 1996). Other terms later on that were used to describe the library of the future were “electronic library,” “virtual library,” “library without walls,” and “bionic library” (Harter, 1996). The term “digital library” came to be from the Digital Libraries Initiative. In 1994, six universities in the United States were granted 24 million dollars for digital library research. This was brought on by the sudden boom of the Internet. “Digital library” is the name that was most widely adopted by academics, researchers, and librarians and is used to describe the process of digitizing information resources. Digitization According to Ram Nath Maurya, there is a stress for three things in the digital

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