What is invisible library?
Digital libraries are sets of electronic resources and associated technical capabilities for creating, searching, and using information. In this sense they are an extension and enhancement of information storage and retrieval systems that manipulate digital data in any medium (text, images, sounds; static or dynamic images) and exist in distributed networks. The content of digital libraries includes data, metadata that describe various aspects of the data (e.g., representation, creator, owner, reproduction rights), and metadata that consist of links or relationships to other data or metadata, whether internal or external to the digital library.
Digital libraries are constructed—collected and organized—by [and for] a community of users, and their functional capabilities support the information needs and uses of that community. They are a component of communities in which individuals and groups interact with each other, using data, information, and knowledge resources and systems. In this sense they are an extension, enhancement, and integration of a variety of information institutions as physical places where resources are selected, collected, organized, preserved, and accessed in support of a user community. These information institutions include, among others, libraries, museums, archives, and schools, but digital libraries also extend and serve other community settings, including classrooms, offices, laboratories, homes, and public spaces. Implicit in this definition of digital libraries is a broad conceptualization of library “collections.”
One theme is that digital libraries encompass the full information life cycle: capturing information at the time of creation, making it accessible, maintaining and preserving it in forms useful to the user community, and sometimes disposing of information. With physical collections, users discover and retrieve content of interest; their use of that material is independent of library systems and services. With digital collections, users may retrieve, manipulate, and contribute content. Thus users are dependent upon the functions and services provided by digital libraries; work practices may become more tightly coupled to system capabilities.
A second theme implicit in the definition of digital libraries is the expanding scope of content that is available. Content now readily available in digital form includes primary sources such as remote sensing data, census data, and archival documents. Use of scientific data sets is computationally intensive, raising questions about the role the library should play in providing access to the resources and to the tools to use them. Nor are scientific data the only challenge. As more archives and special collections are digitized, many primary sources in the humanities are becoming more widely available online than are secondary sources such as books and journals. Distinctions between primary and secondary sources are problematic, however, as they vary considerably by discipline and by context. Some sources may be primary for some purposes and secondary for others. Here I oversimplify the terms by referring to raw data and to unique or original documents as primary sources and to analyzed or compiled data and to reports of research as secondary sources.
A third theme is the need to maintain coherence of library collections. Descriptions (and sometimes content) of journal articles, for example, can be found in catalogs, indexing and abstracting databases, and digital libraries. Users want to identify articles of interest and to move seamlessly from bibliographic references to the full text, and from references in those texts directly to the full content of the cited articles. Sometimes they also wish to link directly to primary sources on which the articles are based. Supporting these uses of journal-related information requires various forms of links within and between many independent catalogs, databases, and digital libraries.
Source: Christine Borgman