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| | h2.Section V: Digital Libraries and the Traditional Library Community |
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| | A large number of digital libraries are now in operation, having been developed in the course of many separate institutional inititatives aimed at broad dissemination of knowledge through computer and network systems. Despite the inclusion of the term "libraries", these efforts are rarely coordinated with operations in traditional libraries, and increasingly are arising without any direct contact with the traditional library community. |
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| | The NSDL is an example of an extended cooperative of related digital library projects which has assembled an extraordinary set of resources and services in support of scientific education. However, there has been limited integration and deployment of NSDL services and content into the existing service programs and infrastructure of the traditional library community. |
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| | This has happened partly because there have been few mechanisms, frameworks, and reference models for the traditional library community to use when seeking to understand and integrate the collections and services provided by the NSDL into the established channels of information discovery and access. There are many protocols for information exchange such as MARC and Z39.50 that are widely used in the traditional library community but not used at all in the wider community now creating digital libraries. This situtation will likely continue as the traditional library community builds on these pre-existing standards to create new updated derivatives such as MODS and ZING that, while updated, are still unlikely to be adopted wholesale by the larger digital library community. Nor are there always clear models explaining the opportunities for bridge systems to easily function as interfaces between the protocols of the traditional and digital library communities. |
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| | The opportunity therefore exists to strengthen the means by which the traditional library community can facilitate and expand access to the content and services of new digital libraries. Traditional libraries are prominent and active channels of information dissemination in virtually every community in the United States. Libraries provide a range of familiar and stable services that add value to information. Learning communities will realize many benefits from a coordinated set of networked services for coordinating the dissemination of digital library resources through established library protocols. |
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| | The larger digital library and web community as a whole has begun to create straightforward frameworks for interoperation through registries and directories of services expressed in standardized notations for interoperation such as WSDL. Such frameworks also enable interoperation with protocols specific to particular communities such as traditional libraries. Better coordination and dissemination of information to learning communities is possible by making use of such frameworks for interoperation. |
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