Chapter 11 - New developments and challenges

Abstract

This chapter discusses future directions of and opportunities for digital library research and development. It begins with the introduction of social media applications in digital libraries, consisting of their definitions, applications, and functions. Subsequently, the discussion of large-scale digital libraries from Chapter 1 continues, with an emphasis on the characteristics of large-scale digital libraries and the related challenges and problems. After that, the chapter delves into multilingual digital libraries as another new direction of digital library development. In particular, the need for multilingual digital libraries, user studies, and a comparison of language-searching functions in several multilingual digital libraries are explored. Finally, the challenges and problems that researchers and practitioners encounter in the development of digital libraries are discussed. Moreover, further research corresponding to each type of challenge is proposed.