Digital Libraries for Your Classroom

Craig A. Cunningham, Ph.D.

What is a Digital Library?

Formal definition: "Organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities." --Digital Library Federation

Informal Definition: "A categorized collection of digital resources" --cac

Key concepts

Digital: "A description of data which is stored or transmitted as a sequence of discrete symbols from a finite set, most commonly this means binary data represented using electronic or electromagnetic signals." (http://hostingworks.com/support/dict.phtml?foldoc=digital).

In other words, information that is stored electronically as binary files consisting of 1s and 0s. "Digital" is a medium for the storage of information, analogous to oral storytellers, clay tablets, scrolls, books.

Multimedia: consisting of sound, images, video, taste (?), scents (?) as well as text

Coherence: unlike traditional libraries, all the content in a digital library is treated the same (searchable, displayable, printable, often linkable)

Selection and categorization: all digital libraries include only material that has been intentionally selected and categorized. The World Wide Web itself is not a digital library

Access: digital libraries offer much quicker and more efficient retrieval of information than traditional (paper-based) libraries

Metadata: digital libraries need to find ways to make searching and retrieval (especially of multimedia content); some solve this by attaching searchable metadata to every object

Public access: some digital libraries make their content available to anyone; others are limited to subscribers and/or members of certain groups (i.e. registered students at a University)

Different from "curriculum": digital libraries do not necessarily have predetermined pathways for travelling through their collections; allow for random access, browsing, searching

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