Building unlimited libraries

Digital libraries are a way of spreading the knowledge that is contained in a conventional library, unimpeded by some of the traditional difficulties.

There are no library closing times, the readers do not need to come to the library and they can make advanced and sophisticated searches in just a few seconds. In turn, libraries can share resources with other libraries and make the content of their books and manuscripts more widely accessible, while maintaining and preserving the originals.

Digital libraries existed before the internet came to popular use. In Project Gutenberg, which was started in 1971 at the University of Illinois, texts were entered manually into a computer.

But the advent of the worldwide web combined with document-scanning technology transformed the potential: thousands of documents could be made available to millions of people.

One of the larger projects undertaken in Europe is the European Library, which started in September 2005 as a way of linking up the national libraries of Europe and getting their content online. With an initial eight national libraries involved, the project has now spread to 30 participants (including most EU states plus Serbia, Switzerland, Iceland and Norway). In some cases library catalogues can be accessed online, in others books and manuscripts can be read.

For example, the digital library of France’s national library, called Gallica, has thousands of digital images of pages, photographs and sound recordings, while the Serbian national library has an interactive digitalised children’s library.

The European Library hopes to evolve with the technology and make use of innovations such as optical character recognition, which can search for key words in a document.

November 2008 will see the start of the European Digital Library, which will involve museums, archives and libraries putting their content online. The European Commission funds €1.3 million of the cost of the European Digital Library but the overall cost has not yet been established.

One of the problems associated with putting content into digital libraries is copyright protection. Frequently it means that only books older than 70 years can be made available online.

That is only one reason why the traditional library is not dead yet. Experience suggests that digitilisation is not just about making the content of a library available to potential readers who would not make a visit. It also means that more people know about the content and catalogues and will therefore be more inclined to visit.

Digital libraries are a way of spreading the knowledge that is contained in a conventional library, unimpeded by some of the traditional difficulties.