Digital libraries, in various forms, continue to be a central issue in the broad fields of library and information sciences. The Digital Libraries Initiative, launched in 1994 by the National Science Foundation, brought together librarians and computer scientists as well as professionals from the publishing industry. Andreas Paepcke, Hector Garcia-Molina, and Rebecca Wesley discuss the Digital Libraries Initiative in their article titled “Dewey Meets Turing: Librarians, Computer Scientists, and the Digital Libraries Initiative”. A particularly interesting point made in this article is that the digital libraries movement, in addition to creating opportunities for connections between librarians and computer scientists, has created opportunities for librarians to work towards building connections with faculty authors. The authors of this article point out that librarians may be able to offer technical support to scholarly authors who wish to share their work via digital mediums; I would add that librarians can and should work towards building a presence in the forum of discussion of changes in scholarly communication, in order to better serve both faculty authors and universities.
William Mischo, in his article titled “Digital Libraries: Challenges and Influential Work” points out that developments in the broad realm of digital libraries have created powerful tools for resource access. Of increasing interest to librarians are federated search tools that allow searching of “myriad distributed digital collections”. These tools allow users to execute a single search that retrieves results from various library collections, the web, and other resources.
Among the resources that librarians are interested in facilitating users’ access to are institutional repositories. Clifford Lynch discusses the potential for institutional repositories to complement existing scholarly publishing practices to enhance teaching and learning by making more materials available to more people; however, Lynch points out that in order to facilitate faculty use of institutional repositories, universities and libraries must align in order to provide technical support to faculty authors and to ensure proper stewardship of materials shared via institutional repositories. This point is particularly important for librarians, who may become central to the preservation of institutional content, as well as to the usability of institutional repositories.
