A digital library is not merely a collection of electronic information. It is an organized and digitized system of data that can serve as a rich resource for its user community. This authoritative and accessible guide for librarians and computer scientists explores the technologies behind digital libraries, the choices to be made in building them, and the economic and policy structures that affect them.
The most comprehensive book on the subject, Practical Digital Libraries
* offers the most wide-ranging overview of digital libraries currently available
* analyzes economic and intellectual issues in the emerging digital environment
* shows how text, images, audio, and video can be represented, distributed, used, and collected as forms of knowledge