Preface

摘要

Since its birth in the early 1990s, the field of digital libraries (DL) has evolved and changed its focus and contour from digital repositories to dynamic spaces for user engagement. The DL field has developed and matured significantly since the early successes of the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. digital library programs-Digital Library Initiative-1 (DLI-1) and Digital Library Initiative-2 (DLI-2). The first six major projects funded by the NSF set in motion the popular conceptions of digital libraries. The success stories of the first decade of DL research, include the "Google" which is a spin-off of the research projects at the Stanford University database group, one of the six DLI-1 projects. Some believe that these six projects-though exciting and very successful, were essentially experiments, and did not really resemble libraries. At the end of the first decade of the domain, there were still concerns about the differing disciplinary perspectives on DL and developing a comprehensive definition that encapsulates the richness of the differing perspectives was felt and led to the DELOS manifesto (2007), which laid the framework for a more comprehensive envisioning of a Digital Library as a tool at the centre of intellectual activity having no logical, conceptual, physical, temporal, or personal borders or barriers on information.