"Digital libraries are organizations that provide the resources,
including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer
intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity
of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital
works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a
defined community or set of communities."
Working definition for the Digital Library
Federation
The term digital library is fairly general, and is
used in a variety of
ways. The two required elements are an entity that provides
services such as reference, access guidence and instruction, and a
corpus of knowlege existing in an electronic format. The nature
of the knowledge varies. In some, it could be collections of
articles and other electronic resources. In others, it is
digitized copies of print materials. For either, however, the
body of knowledge has to be big enough and varied enough that it is a
collection and not a single subscription or document. It is
generally agreed that a physical library just having a web page does
not constitute a digital library. The key is that there is not
just links or guidance, but the actual knowledge that would be the end
point of a search. This knowledge must be structured or described
in some fashion, allowing for browsing or searching at the document
level. Some digital libraries offer searching at the page level
as well.
Library of
Congress Subject Headings: Many of the
resources about digital libraries in the UNC library catalog fall under
these subject headings
Libraries-United States-Special
Collections-Computer Files
Digital Libraries-United States
Digital Preservation
Electronic
Records
