Digital Libraries and Repositories | 01/03/2003

Imagine a world in which every resource produced by every teacher and every student was available to every other teacher and student. Would that be a "good thing"? It would certainly be better than a world in which nothing was shared and every teacher had to write their own textbooks, develop their own case studies, produce their own diagrams, videos and conceptual models. Yet most people reading the first sentence would probably hesitate and say "that depends....". What does it depend on? It depends on access, organisation, structure, context, support, relationships, communication, cost and many other aspects.

This white paper considers the nature of "resources" and the way they need to be stored and organised to make them easily retrievable and useable. A century ago the resources held in a library were all physical objects: books, maps, journals, manuscripts, musical scores. The value offered by keeping them in a library included custodianship, cataloguing and retrievability. Nowadays these physical resources are still just as valuable but many other types of resource have been added: video, audio, digital assets of all kinds. In addition, the concept of the library as a physical storage location has been replaced by the library as a service. The principal functions of the service are still custodianship, cataloguing and retrievability but the resources themselves may be distributed around the world.

The idea of what constitutes a user of a library is also changing. While modern libraries cater for people, just as libraries did in the past, there is also now the potential for libraries to provide services to electronic agents. These agents may play many roles from searching on behalf of other library systems, to automating the generation and updating of reading lists, to delivery of learning objects into virtual learning environments.

For full text, follow the link