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Digital Libraries
November 2002
Access to Human Knowledge
The notion of a "digital library" is a metaphor for
thinking about data collections in a networked world.
Digital libraries may take many forms, but they all
share some common infrastructure and goals. For starters,
digital libraries build upon collections of digital
or digitized data and rely on the Internet for accessing
and sharing these collections. Common goals include
preserving the data over time for interested communities
and helping transform the data into information and
knowledge.
Challenges
According to a University of California, Berkeley,
report, humanity produces about 250 megabytes of data
(roughly the text in 250 books) each year for every
person on the planet. Only 0.003 percent of this annual
output is in printed form; most is in the form of
images, sound and numeric data, with more than 90
percent stored digitally. In the face of this data
onslaught, digital library research approaches the
problem on three fronts. Meaningful collections from
all facets of society must be compiled, structured
and preserved. Increasing computational power and
network bandwidth must be applied to make these collections
accessible, usable and interoperable. And interfaces
to these collections must be designed to be appropriate,
clear, flexible and scalable.
Possibilities
Digital libraries add value to their collections through
services that allow scientists, teachers and students
to access, explore, search and interact with the data,
as well as connect to information in other collections.
They add context to data that might otherwise languish
as disconnected content. NSF-supported research spans
collections from archeology to oral history.
- International Children's Digital Library.
Funded in part by a five-year, $3 million NSF
award, the University of Maryland, The Internet
Archive, and their partners plan to build a library
of 10,000 children's books from 100 cultures as
part of a research project to develop new technology
to serve young readers. The International Children's
Digital Library will serve children aged 3 to
13 years worldwide. See http://www.icdlbooks.org/.
- Informedia Video Digital Library.
Initiated in 1994, this project at Carnegie Mellon
University has pioneered new approaches for full-content
search and retrieval of TV and radio news and
documentary broadcasts. The current library consists
of a 1,500-hour, one-terabyte library of daily
news captured over the past two years and documentaries
produced for public television and government
agencies. See http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/.
- Archeological Sites and Relics.
Researchers at UCLA are putting online a real-time
computer model of the Roman Forum as it appeared
in late antiquity. Another group at UCLA, with
collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for
the History of Science, in Berlin, is providing
scholars with access to a database of tens of
thousands of cuneiform tablets and inscriptions.
See http://www.cvrlab.org/
and http://cdli.ucla.edu/.
- National Gallery of the Spoken Word.
Michigan State University and partner organizations
are creating a spoken word collection spanning
the 20th century. From Thomas Edison's first cylinder
recordings to Neil Armstrong's "one small step
for man," this project is addressing challenges
such as digital watermarking, compression strategies,
audio searches, and user-selectable speech enhancement.
See http://www.ngsw.org/.
- New Forms of Access. The University
of California, Berkeley, Digital Library and the
Alexandria Digital Library at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, both established in
1994, are researching how digital formats open
up new ways to access data. At Berkeley, researchers
are exploring how the digital form expands the
definition of "documents," especially scholarly
publications. The Alexandria Digital Library is
building a map collection along with novel tools
to access geographically referenced data. See
http://elib.cs.berkeley.edu/
and http://www.alexandria.ucsb.edu/.
- E-Specimens. Two projects at
the University of Texas at Austin provide access
to libraries of biological specimens. The DigiMorph
library is an archive of X-ray computed tomography
of biological specimens. The site's animations
and details are in use in classrooms and research
labs around the world. The e-Skeletons Project
lets users examine the bones of a human, gorilla
and baboon and information about them in an osteology
database. See http://www.digimorph.org/
and http://www.eskeletons.org/.
- Dolphin Photo-identification.
DARWIN, a system developed by undergraduates at
Eckerd College in Florida, assists marine scientists
in the study of bottlenose dolphins. The software
provides access to a collection of dorsal fin
images along with information and sighting data
on individuals.
- Among other features, users may query the system
with an image of an unidentified dolphin's dorsal
fin. See http://darwin.eckerd.edu/.
A Decade of NSF Support
From 1994 to 1998, NSF, DARPA, and NASA funded six
digital library projects in the $30 million Phase
1 of the Digital Libraries Initiative. In 1999, the
$55 million Phase 2 (DLI-2) included 36 projects supported
by NSF, DARPA, the National Library of Medicine, the
Library of Congress, NASA, and the National Endowment
for the Humanities, with participation from the National
Archives and the Smithsonian Institution, to extend
and develop innovative digital library technologies
and applications. For more details, see http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/.
Today, NSF continues to support digital libraries research
in programs through several directorates. DLI-2 and
an International Digital Libraries Collaborative Research
program are administered within the Directorate for
Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE).
NSF's Information Technology Research program also
supports several digital library research projects.
NSF's Directorate for Education and Human Resources
(EHR) administers the National Science Digital Library
(NSDL), which builds on earlier DLI-2 projects and
aims to establish a network of learning environments
and resources for science, technology, engineering
and mathematics education. See http://www.nsdl.org/.
NSF's Geosciences and EHR directorates administer the
Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE).
DLESE is a grassroots effort, affiliated with NSDL,
that involves teachers, students and scientists. DLESE
encompasses electronic materials such as lesson plans,
maps, images, data sets, visualizations, assessment
activities, curriculum and online courses. See http://www.dlese.org/.
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