Analytical review of the library of the future
chapter one
background to study
During the last few years, a wide variety of organizations have begun to explore the concept of a library of the future (or digital library). Groups including the National Science Foundation (NSF), American Association of University Presidents (AAUP), Research Libraries Group (RLG), Xerox Corporation, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), and Commission on Preservation and Access have sponsored meetings and initiatives designed to help participants consider the digital library.
Publishers are also investigating the digital library concept because the cost of creating print products has increased substantially in recent years and subscriptions are decreasing, especially subscriptions to scholarly journals. The diversity and number of these groups indicates the growing awareness that some components of a digital library can be implemented immediately but others require profound social, organizational and financial changes that will require careful rethinking of the current dominant paper-based means of accessing information to create new access forms freed from physical space and temporal restrictions.
This emergence of so many diverse groups involved in the exploration of the digital library concept suggests that enough of the enabling technologies are now available and affordable to spark genuine interest in testing new forms of information capture, management and retrieval. At the same time, the increasing cost of paperbased journals and books and the library buildings to hold them have generated strong interest among university administrators to identify alternative approaches. It becomes increasingly difficult to keep informed of the scholarly research and development of all those exploring and implementing ideas related to the library of the future because much of the discussion extends beyond literature published in traditional formats such as printed books, newsletters, and journals to electronic resources such as bulletin boards, mailing lists, newsgroups, and electronic publications.
By keeping abreast of new developments, librarians can shape the future, lay claim to crucial roles, and ensure that the new digital libraries reflect their own values and are not replaced by those of other professions. Recognizing the growing importance of the library of the future and the burgeoning literature on this topic, the principal investigator of this project and the president of Karen M. Drabenstott
The Library of the Future the Council on Library Resources discussed the idea of preparing an analytical bibliography of published literature on the library of the future. After support from the Council enabled the authors to begin this project in April 1993, a key development in this area occurred in September 1993 with the announcement of the Digital Libraries Initiative, a joint initiative of NSF, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (“Research on digital libraries” 1993).
Not only will this initiative provide significant funding and leadership for research fundamental to the development of digital libraries, it will mark a significant investment in the establishment of digital libraries that will extend far beyond the term of the initiative.
1.2Project objectives Support from the Council enabled the authors of this analytical bibliography to achieve the following four
project objectives:
1. To identify and retrieve published literature on the library of the future.
2. To formulate document surrogates for this literature and add them to a computerized database.
3. To generate an analytical bibliography of published library of the future literature
4. To synthesize literature in the bibliography with a thinkpiece on the library of the future.
Do You Have New or Fresh Topic? Send Us Your Topic
3Methodology
To achieve the project’s first objective, the authors searched commercially-available databases (i.e., ERIC, LISA, ISA, Library Literature, OCLC Online Union Catalog, Current Library) on the Dialog, Wilsonline, EPIC, and NEXIS retrieval systems, respectively, for citations to literature published during a ten-year period between 1983 and 1994. They also solicited citations from SILS faculty and affiliates. The authors retrieved published literature from library collections of the University of Michigan, Wayne State University, and Detroit Public Library, and from interlibrary loan requests.
They also reviewed selected electronic journals and newsletters such as PACS-L Review and Current Cites to find material on the library of the future. To accomplish the project’s second objective, the authors read retrieved material, formulated document surrogates consisting of citations, descriptors, and abstracts, and built a ProCite database containing these surrogates. They assigned descriptors to ProCite-based document surrogates based on the Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors
INSTRUCTIONS AFTER PAYMENT
- 1.Your Full name
- 2. Your Active Email Address
- 3. Your Phone Number
- 4. Amount Paid
- 5. Project Topic
- 6. Location you made payment from