Book Review: Exploring Digital Libraries: Foundations, Practice, Prospects

Abstract

Exploring Libraries: Foundations, Practice, Prospects. By Karen Calhoun. Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman, 2014. 352 p. $95 softcover (ISBN 978-1-55570-985-3). The back cover of Calhouns book Exploring Libraries: Foundations, Practice, and Prospects declares it landmark text on digital libraries for students of LIS, educators and practicing information professionals throughout the It also states that it provides an authoritative and in-depth treatment of the digital library arena, from the fields emergence to current topics and future prospects. Calhoun is a prolific and well-respected author and lecturer on the subject of digital libraries, and is definitely someone worthy of earning such accolades. The book consists of two main themes. The first is a broad, international overview of the past twenty-plus years of digital libraries, while the second concerns the roles digital libraries play in relationship to their online communities. Chapter 1, Emergence and Definitions of Libraries, covers the first decade of this brave new world. The World Wide Web had been born, costs associated with computing had become much more affordable, and the National Science Foundation assembled a series of workshops on how to make digital libraries a reality. Projects such as the eLib Programme in the UK and the Library Initiatives (DLI-1 and DLI-2) in the US, plus Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, gave a taste of what was to come. Calhoun also uses this chapter to establish the definition of digital libraries upon which she bases the rest of the book. In her eyes, digital libraries are both a multidisciplinary field of research and practice, and the systems and services that support the advancement of knowledge and culture; contain managed of digital content; and often utilize architecture from the computer and information science/ library field (e.g., repository, resource identifiers, user interface). In chapter 2, Outcomes of Libraries' First Decade, Calhoun identifies several key results from this initial period. These include a new field of research and practice, the transformation of scholarly communication processes, open access, digitization and digital preservation, metadata and its standards, and actual working digital libraries and the they serve. Each outcome is discussed in detail, and introduces such topics as D-Lib Magazine, PageRank (Googles forerunner), the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), JSTOR (short for Journal Storage), Dublin Core, the Library of Congress' American Memory, and the British Library Online Newspaper Archive. Chapter 3, Key Themes and Challenges in Libraries, introduces the concept map that Calhoun created based on the major themes from the digital library literature of the decade 2002-12. The map consists of a collection of keywords plotted in a continuum of themes and topics arranged from collections to communities (x-axis) and from technology to social and economic aspects (y-axis). The remainder of the book is based on both this map and the four challenges that she has identified to building and for digital libraries: interoperability (providing uniform access for users to diverse information from various systems), community engagement, intellectual property rights, and sustainability. Chapter 4, Digital Library Collections: Repositories, begins with a look at traditional library and collection development in light of the web. It provides a close examination of digital repositories, including content usage and discovery (e.g., Google Scholar), the application of repository software (e.g., DSpace, Fedora), and web services such as XML (Extensible Markup Language), and concludes with examples of next-generation repositories such as Drupal and Scholar's Workbench. Chapter 5, Hybrid Libraries, wraps up the book's first theme by examining the interaction between library users and hybrid libraries (collections of non-digital, digitized, and born-digital materials). …