What is a digital library? The social impact of information artifacts

Author

Lyman, Peter

Author_Institution

Sch. of Inf. Manage. & Syst., California Univ., Berkeley, CA, USA

fYear

2000

fDate

2000

Firstpage

57

Lastpage

61

Abstract

The term `digital library” is used as a generic name for many kinds of digital collections, making it difficult to build a cumulative understanding of what has been learned from different kinds of technical projects to digitize, organize, search and preserve digital documents. This paper classifies digital libraries by looking at the social impact of information artifacts, using data on the amount of information produced annually in different storage formats, as well as concepts derived from the sociology of innovation. At least four types of digital libraries can be derived by this method: (1) digitized documents from analog media; (2) “born digital” documents; (3) digital data; and (4) archives of network communications

Keywords

digital libraries; social aspects of automation; archives of network communications; born digital documents; digital collections; digital data; digital library; digitized documents; information artifacts; social impact; Automation; Design engineering; Information management; Information technology; Innovation management; Printing machinery; Sociology; Software libraries; Technological innovation; Technology management;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Digital Libraries: Research and Practice, 2000 Kyoto, International Conference on.

Conference_Location

Kyoto

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1022-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/DLRP.2000.942152

Filename

942152