-
Bush Devised Idea
a device in which an individual stores all his
books, records, and communications, and which
is mechanized so that it may be consulted with
exceeding speed and flexibility. -
Book authored by Bush on Digital libraries
about how a computer could
provide an automated library with simultaneous
remote use by many different people through
access to a common database. -
Research and development started
research and development activity
on digital libraries started in the early -
"arXiv" First system
This system, originally named
“e-print archive” and now worldwide known as
arXiv, was born as an experimental means for
making scientific communication more effective
and economic -
he University of Michigan Digital Library
(Crum, 1995) focused on creating
a digital library architecture based on the notion of
software “agents” -
ETRDL start
RCIM, the European
Research Consortium for Informatics and Math- ematics, asked to join the NCSTRL network. This gave birth to ETRDL, the European Technical Report Digital Library -
he Alexandria Digi-tal Library
(Smith and Frew, 1995) focused on building an online, distributed digital library for
geo-referenced1
information, including maps,
aerial photographs, satellite imagery, and cata-
logue records, and on supporting geographically
defined queries ( -
the Stanford Digital Library Project
(Stanford Digital Libraries Group, 1995) focused
on addressing aspects of interoperability over
heterogeneous services and collections via the
“InfoBus” protocol, which provides a uniform
way to access a variety of services and information
sources through “translators” -
the Informedia Digital Video Library
(Christel, Kanade, Maudlin,
et al., 1995) focused on establishing a large, on-
line digital video collection with full-content and
knowledge-based search and retrieval -
the Interspace (Schatz, 1995)
focused on building a large collec-
tion of technical engineering and physics literature
that can be searched effectively across multiple
indexes with a single interface -
the California Environmental Digital Library
Wilensky, 1995) focused on developing the
technologies to access large, distributed collec-
tions of photographs, satellite images, videos,
maps, documents, and “multivalent documents”
and to support work-centred digital information
services -
whose pilot project
system which was of-
fering services for submitting, browsing and
searching electronic thesis in PDF format. -
CogPrints
was initially conceived as reposi-
tory allowing the cognitive science community
to self-archive their papers -
distributed and networked collections
(Belkin, 1999) new sys-
tem development activities started with the goal
of supporting scholars by providing them with
the functionality of a traditional library (collect,
store, organise and discovery information) in the
context of distributed and networked collections
of digital information objects in user-friendly
ways -
Period: to
DELOS working group
the main objective of DELOS was to
advance the state of the art in the field of digital
libraries by coordinating the effort of the major
European research teams conducting activities
in the main fields of interest. One of the early
important achievements was the establishment
of a formal collaboration with the US National
Science Foundation and the creation of five joint
EU-US collaborative Working Groups. -
Open Archives Initiative
CogPrints was made compliant with the protocol defined by
the Open Archives Initiative and
then its software was converted into the EPrints
Digital Repository Software (EPrints, (n.d.)), a
flexible platform supporting easy and fast set up
of repositories of open access research outputs. -
ARTISTE
Another project, i.e. An
Integrated Art Analysis and Navigation Environ-
ment focused on giving providers, publishers,
distributors, rights protectors and end users of art
images information, as well as the multi-media
information market as a whole, a more efficient
system for storing, classifying, linking, matching
and retrieving art images. This environment was
providing, for example, automatic extraction of
metadata based on iconography, painting style,
etc; content-based navigation -
Santa Fe Convention
a
combination of organizational principles and
technical specifications to facilitate a minimal but
potentially highly functional level of interoper-
ability among scholarly e-print archives – and to
the establishment of the Open Archives Initiative. -
Open Archive Protocol for Meta-data Harvesting
Open Archive Protocol for Meta-
data Harvesting (OAI-PMH) ( This is a simple protocol
made by six protocol requests and responses and
because of its simplicity and relatively low cost
of adoption it is so diffuse as to become a sort of
de-facto standard solution. -
FIrst large scale DL implementation
One of the first experiments of implementing
a large-scale digital library search service across
multiple data providers was performed by TEL,
The European Library project, which started in
2001 -
National Science Digital Library
In the US, the National Science Foundation
funded the National Science Digital Library
(NSDL) (Zia, L.L., 2001) with the aim to provide
organized access to high quality resources and
tools that support innovations in teaching and
learning at all levels of science, technology, en-
gineering, and mathematics education -
publicly funded research
The arXiv system opened the way to deal
with the social and economical issues related to
the open access to outputs coming from publicly
funded research, that were later officially stated in
the Berlin Declaration -
DARE
Another important initiative for large-scale
cross-repository services was DARE, the Digital
Academic REpositories
Started in 2003, this was a joint
initiative by Dutch Universities, National Library
of Nederland, and other Dutch Organizations. Its
aim was to store the digital outcome of all Dutch
research in a common network of Institutional Repositories -
prototype of repository system
-
European Chronicles On-Line (ECHO)
focus-
ing on the development of a digital library service
for historical films by using an open architecture
approach distributing digital film archive ser-
vices. In addition, it was intended to develop new
models for intelligent audio-visual content-based
searching and film-sequence retrieval, new video
abstracting tools, and user interfaces specifically
tailored to the new functionality. -
END of TEL
TEL was finished in 2004 and now
delivers a web service for accessing the combined
resources (books, magazines, journals, etc. – both
digital and non-digital) of the forty-five national
libraries of Europe. It offers free searching and
delivers digital objects – some free, some priced. -
Period: to
DELOS evolution
Its mis-
sion was to integrate and coordinate the on-going
research activities of the major European research
teams in the field of Digital Libraries -
DL initiative
The initiatives that started
giving live to such systems, that can be reason-
ably considered as substantial digital libraries,
were the Digital Library Initiative (DLI) in the
US, while national initiatives, e.g. eLib in UK,
and EU funded projects including a dedicated
Network of Excellence, DELOS (DELOS, (n.d.)),
have characterised the European scene -
“DELOS DL Reference Model
a formal and conceptual framework describing
the characteristics of the Digital Library domain. -
EDLnet Launch
Originally known as
the European digital library network – EDLnet – it
is the result of a partnership of 100 representatives of heritage and knowledge organisations and IT
experts from throughout Europe. Objective of
Europeana is to provide access to Europe’s cultural
and scientific heritage through a cross-domain