The remarkable expansion in the generation and dissemination of digital information in the last decade as a result of the availability of high speed electronic networks has dramatically changed the nature and role of data archives and traditional libraries. Since the mid-1980s, information sources accessed via the Internet have multiplied rapidly. These include a mixture of data and knowledge sources in all electronically available forms: reference volumes, books, journals, newspapers, national phone directories, sound and voice recordings, images, video clips, scientific data as well as private information services such as stock market reports and private newsletters. These knowledge sources, when connected electronically through a network of networks, are the ingredients of a digital library.
A digital library is literally a library "without walls" -- a knowledge resource open 24 hours a day, accessible via the network. To explore the full benefits of such digital libraries, the challenge for research and development is not merely how to connect everyone and everything together in the network. Rather, it is to achieve economically feasible technologies with which to digitize massive corpora of existing and new information from heterogeneous and distributed sources; then store, search, process and retrieve the information in a user friendly way. Among other things, this will require both fundamental research and development of "intelligent" software and user interfaces; ubiquitous network services for reliable and secure information access; and a new generation of database technologies for managing multimedia, cross-cultural, and interorganizational complexities of knowledge explosion. Equally important are mechanisms to ensure the maintenance (and potential payment for use) of intellectual property. One could image a small fee being charged to each reader of a "fee for access" document published on an open network.
Consider the following scenario. A high school student has been given the assignment to produce a report on folklore of the Middle Ages. The student uses the network to connect to college libraries across the country, and to search the bibliographical indexes for books and articles about the period and the topic she is interested in. Focusing her report on the myths surrounding death in rural England in the early Middle Ages, she filters the enormous amount of information available to a reasonably manageable list of references. She accesses these books directly over the network, viewing them on her computer screen while creating a multimedia report that contains linkages back to the underlying sources. These sources, in turn, have linkages to primary sources, such as an online copy of the famous "Doomsday Book" of English history. She hands her report in to her instructor, who views the report on his own computer. This allows him to check her references directly. For her thorough job, she gets an A on the report.