Digital Libraries: Integrating Content and Systems

Textbooks on digital libraries continue to arrive thick and fast. The present volume has been written by a team drawn from academic libraries in Oregon in the United States. The authors' aim, which I feel has generally been met, is to “create a roadmap to significant technologies and how they affect academic and public libraries as they navigate through a period of change”. They clearly see their work appealing to both academic and public libraries and I think that it will.

Unlike many previous books on the subject of digital libraries, the present volume focuses heavily on the technical aspects that are often only discussed in passing in more introductory textbooks. However, despite the large number of subjects covered, the text only runs to 184 pages, so most individual topics are dealt with in, at most, one or two pages. In some cases a topic has been deemed worthy only of a single paragraph. Prospective readers therefore should see this book very much as a primer or handy reference tool rather than one providing in‐depth topic coverage.

Individual sections are clearly written and the material is sensibly ordered. The introductory chapter introduces the important vocabulary for enabling technologies including network operating systems, web and proxy servers, XML and dynamic web pages, the semantic web and “mashing”. There are eight main chapters exploring important issues such as standards, access management, interfacing, electronic resource management, digital asset management, integration with content providers, and library portals. These are followed by a concluding chapter, which explores the role of the digital library within the overall library service. Each chapter starts with an introductory paragraph explaining what the chapter covers and ends with a bulleted summary. There is a short, but serviceable bibliography with a very high proportion of references available electronically. As one would expect these are mostly of recent origin with the exception of a few classic papers from the 1990s.

The index is very short and unfortunately little attempt is made to provide access to subtopics (for example, there are 29 undifferentiated references to XML). There is a helpful list of abbreviations most of which have index entries. There is no glossary, presumably because the authors see the whole volume as a sort of glossary. Overall this is a highly readable book, suitable for anybody with an interest in digital libraries wishing to gain a basic knowledge of some of the recent technical advances. If you want a brief overview of Shibboleth, LDAP, DAM, Fedora or SRU/W, or have no idea what they are, then this is the book for you.