A Look at Assumptions Underlying Digital Libraries

What are digital libraries, how should they be designed, how will they be used, and what relationship will they bear to what we now call “libraries”? Although we cannot hope to answer all these crucial questions in this short article, we do hope to encourage, and in some small measure to shape, the dialog among computer scientists, librarians, and other interested parties out of which answers may arise. Our contribution here is to make explicit, and to question, certain assumptions that underlie current digital library efforts. We will argue that current efforts are limited by a largely unexamined