Digital Libraries

Libraries have always been the organisations that serve the need of a society to store its ever-growing knowledge of the world in which we live. The purposes to which such knowledge is put, the manner in which it is represented and the responsibilities of those who are its custodians has changed dramatically over time, never more so than in the last century. As we look forward to this, the third millennium, libraries are becoming ‘digital’ and their structure, function, role and activities are broader in scope and face greater challenges than ever before. Libraries, digital or otherwise, have always represented the knowledge ‘asset’ of a society. Historically, past cultures are often remembered for the sophistication and importance of the libraries that they created. Explore the history of the library of Alexandria as an example of the relationship between societal advancement and the role of libraries in reflecting achievement. For most of history, libraries have had to deal with the limitations and possibilities available in the physical world. The ability to use ‘words that last’ to store and communicate knowledge has always been a powerful tool, this was well understood by some of the original librarians, those of the church (regardless of denomination). The ongoing and meticulous work of theologians in documenting knowledge and using it to shape culture is well known. The limitations of this pre-Gutenberg time were the sheer task of writing, the availability of the medium on which to write (and its impermanence) and the physical requirement for safely storing and archiving the results of such efforts. We still marvel today at the detail and care with which knowledge was recorded by hand in centuries past, at the same time we note the need to care for the frail medium of the time (ancient inks and ancient paper). The liberation of print by the invention of the printing press is a story well known to us all. In a very short period of time, those previously responsible for the laborious task of hand writing library works found they had to completely reinvent their role as carers of knowledge. Dissemination of knowledge escalated dramatically as printing presses could produce print at orders of magnitude faster than any collection of scribes. I am sure that the accompanying reduction in what was then seen as ‘quality’ of print distressed those who felt that books were a combination of art and words, not print alone (an early example of change management ?). From this point on, the world of libraries changed as they adopted new roles in the dissemination of knowledge. The concomitant growth in available knowledge (it was now much easier and therefore cheaper to produce new books) resulted in libraries having to invent new and more robust ways in which to order this knowledge to facilitate retrieval, in this we can see some of the the origins of knowledge management. This situation of a print-based world, operating within the domains of the physical, is the story of libraries in the past centuries. The last century saw the world, once again, undergo another massive change in possibilities, the digital world had arrived.