Digital Library

Examples of digital libraries (from Witten and Bainbrdige):

1. Supporting Human Development: Kataayi—rural Uganda—community members have “built ferrocement rainwater catchment tanks, utilized renewable energy technologies (solar, wind, biogas), and established a local industry making clay roofing tiles.” All this was made available using the Humanity Development Library which sent 1,200 books on CD-ROM for them to use. As Witten and Bainbridge point out, these 1,200 books “would weigh 340 kg, cost $20,000, and occupy a small library bookstack.” The Kataayi community also uses related collections of materials on CD-ROM with such topics as disaster relief, agriculture, the environment, medicine and health, food and nutrition, etc.
2. Pushing the Frontiers of Science: “for the last decade physicists have been using automated archives to disseminate the results of their research.” In 1990, 200 physicists started the project with a few research questions and papers. By 2000, tens of thousands of physicists were using it and over 150,000 papers were in the archives with 150,000 requests handled daily. As Witten and Bainbridge note, “for some areas of physics, online archives have already become the dominant means of communicating research progress.” Pp3
3. Preserving a Traditional Culture. Worried that their culture and traditions were vanishing, the Zia Pueblo are creating a digital library that “will include an oral history compilation, with interviews of tribal elders conducted in their native language…an anthology of traditional songs, with audio recordings, musical scores transcribed from them, and lyrics translated by a native speaker…video recordings of tribal members performing Pueblo dances and ceremonies, along with a synopsis describing each ceremony and a transcription and translation of the recorded audio.” Pp4
4. Exploring Popular Music. Very like iTunes. That is what I thought, at least, initially when it was described as “a digital music library that reflects popular taste, a library that people from all walks of life will want to use.” But there are some singular features: the ability to submit tunes either by recording yourself humming or by MIDI keyboard—and have the library search based on the sound file (for all those people who, like the Billy Joel song, who know the song is “sad and its sweet and I knew it complete, when I wore a younger man’s clothes”); can search by lyrics, titles, authors/composer, etc.

As Witten and Bainbridge point out, these “four examples…hint at the immense range of digital libraries” and they are not, as it “often seem[s] scholarly and esoteric.” p5 I would here concur completely and point to Digital Case as the prime example, as it not only holds a diverse array of materials, but in the future will diversify even further. Right now there are image files, such as the WPA Prints collection; Audio files, such as the Center for Policy Studies lecture series; video files, such as the Freedman Center video collection; datasets, such as the work by Tim Beal in his consideration of pluralism in undergraduate students at Case; there are fulltext digital books; and much more.

Witten and Bainbridge then go about providing technical definitions of what libraries are, what digital libraries are, how they are different or mean different things to everyone, and so on. But I think the most important point they make is the point that leads off this article, namely that:

Digital Libraries “are about new ways of dealing with knowledge: preserving, collecting, organizing, propagating, and accessing it—not about deconstructing existing institutions and putting them inside an electronic box.”

This is one of the main goals of the Freedman Center’s Freedman Fellows program, which will soon be kicking off its fourth year of making significant connections between faculty and new technologies: specifically to introduce them to the new tools available and encourage new ways of seeing how scholarship and technology can interact.

With all this in mind, Witten and Bainbridge state that a “digital library is conceived as an organized collection of information… a focused collection of digital objects, including text, video, and audio, along with methods for access and retrieval, and for selection, organization, and maintenance of the collection.” p6

I guess the only thing I would add to this definition, at least explicitly (as it may be taken to have been implied) is “a focused collection of DESCRIBED digital objects…” to put the emphasis on the metadata element that is essential to a good digital collection. As I said, this may have been implied by “methods for access and retrieval” or even “organization” but, knowing what I know now the importance of metadata is almost as important as the object itself.

Witten and Bainbridge go on to mention the inclusion of such things as 3D objects, simulations, dynamic visualizations, and virtual reality worlds. Some of these, I think, go a bit far. At Case we consider some of these elements to be “learning objects” and leave them in the sphere of instructional technologies, which often are organized in a manner similar to digital libraries. Virtual worlds are entities in and of themselves and suggests to my mind the notion of saying, “our digital library includes other digital libraries,” but perhaps some do. Close to this is the notion that a virtual world is not necessarily a “digital object,” unless you want to consider it a massive digital object with extraordinarily complex properties. 3D objects are something that Digital Case is considering as well.

“Every collection should have a well-articulated purpose, which states the objectives it is intended to achieve, and a set of principles, which are the directives that will guide decisions on what should be included and—equally important—what should be excluded.” Pp7

As if to confirm the above paragraph, Witten and Bainbridge draw a firm distinction between a digital library and the World Wide Web in general:

“the Web lacks the essential features of selection and organization…what connects a new acquisition into the structure of a physical library is partly where it is placed upon the shelves, but more important is the information about it that is included in the library catalog” that is, the metadata.”

This is, of course, not to say that there are no websites out in dubdub land that are not carefully organized and that provide excellent selection criteria, but on the whole, the Web is a chaos where very little critical thought is applied to the content. I do not agree with Witten and Bainbridge in their other characterization that the ease by which material can be added is a significant determinant of whether something is or is not—nor that the requirement of “manual updating the structures used for access and retrieval” adversely impact the categorization either: after all, applying this definition would exclude all the years in which card catalogs had to be painfully (manually) updated, created, and installed as a part of the regular system of library functions.

I will continue this discussion later.