Recent academic and commercial efforts in digital libraries have demonstrated the significant potential for largescale, on-line search and retrieval of cataloged multimedia content. By improving access to scientific, educational, and historical documents and information, digital libraries create powerful opportunities for revamping education, accelerating scientific discovery and technical adva...

Purpose: This paper is a high-level investigation of the physical-conceptual continuum occupied by both digital and physical libraries. Methodology/Approach: A framework is provided for thinking about the notions of place and library. The issue of materials and the ideas they represent is considered. Places for people are considered, including issues of people's sense of place in physical and d...

The Internet and the Web have been growing in leaps over the past few years, accelerating the problem of information explosion, a well-known phenomenon to all of us. Indeed, search engines (SEs) that have popped up everywhere enable us to access the cyberspace, but they flood us with vast amounts of irrelevant information. Nonetheless, considering the vast amount of information, the Web is cons...

Purpose: To introduce the digital libraries of the future, their enabling technologies and their organizational models. Design/methodology/approach: The paper first discusses the requirements for the digital libraries of the future, then presents the DILIGENT infrastructure as a technological response to these requirements and, finally, it discusses the role that libraries can play in the organ...

Digital libraries (DL) serve communities of people and are created and maintained by and for people. People and their information needs are central to all libraries, digital or otherwise. All efforts to design, implement, and evaluate digital libraries must be rooted in the information needs, characteristics, and contexts of the people who will or may use those libraries. Like most principles, ...

In the last decades digital libraries play an important role in knowledge sharing. There are many digital library systems for building of digital collections and repositories. Comparison of digital libraries systems was widely discussed in many scientific papers. Nevertheless, these papers are usually aimed to description and comparison of features and capabilities of digital libraries. In this...

A structured overview is presented of the challenges that librarians have to face today and tomorrow, due to the evolution from classical libraries towards libraries that function at least partially as digital libraries, the so-called hybrid libraries. This is a consequence of the fast evolution in information and communication technology (ICT) that has lead to more applications of ICT, not onl...

Purpose – Digital libraries have the potential to offer unprecedented resources for supporting e-learning. This paper addresses and discusses such aspects as what is meant by “e-learning”, and how can it be supported by the library environment, the functionality of the digital library; and how e-learning resources are included and organized in the digital library. Design/methodology/approach – ...