A digital library system with mechanisms of collaboration support

The paper describes the importance of collaboration support for a digital library. Collaboration among users is required in an ordinary library. Users of a digital library can utilize advanced collaboration functions which are supported by computer systems. Four types of user in a digital library are defined: customers who utilize information from documents in libraries; reference librarians who support customers and maintain reference materials; catalog librarians who gather, organize and register documents; and providers who create, edit and publish documents. We study collaborations among these kinds of users such as collaborative searching, collaborative reading, shared glossaries, collaborative registration, and question and answer databases. We have developed a prototype of a digital library system with collaboration support mechanisms