Practical Digital Libraries

"While others speculate on the organizational dilemmas facing libraries and universities in a digital information environment or argue the relative philosophical merits of print versus digital media, Lesk has constructed an on-the-ground picture of the various working components of the digital environment. Viewed as a whole and with an engineering sense of composition, his picture is remarkable--almost astonishing--because it reveals how advanced the digital environment has truly become." --Donald J. Waters Associate University Librarian, Yale University A digital library is not merely a collection of electronic information. It is an organized and digitized system of data that can serve as a rich resource for its user community. This authoritative and accessible guide for librarians and computer scientists explores the technologies behind digital libraries, the choices to be made in building them, and the economic and policy structures that affect them. The most comprehensive book on the subject, Practical Digital Libraries offers the most wide-ranging overview of digital libraries currently available analyzes economic and intellectual issues in the emerging digital environment shows how text, images, audio, and video can be represented, distributed, used, and collected as forms of knowledge