D-Lib Magazine

March/April 2015
Volume 21, Number 3/4

Editorial

The Practice of Digital Libraries

Laurence Lannom
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
llannom@cnri.reston.va.us

DOI: 10.1045/march2015-editorial

The practice of digital libraries continues to evolve and the range of that practice is well represented in our current issue of nine full articles, including both studies of the current state of affairs and the cutting edge of tool and resource development. We start with a case study (Oliver and Knight) from the National Library of New Zealand addressing the issue of outsourcing storage. It seems clear that this will become a topic of increasing importance in the digital library world and the authors identify the benefits, challenges, and lessons learned from the experience of their institution going through this process.

We follow this with four articles addressing current practice, including a survey of digital collection management practices among non-ARL libraries (Bishoff and Smith); a survey of metadata practices among U.S. based OpenDOAR repositories (Moulaison, et al.); a survey of electronic theses and dissertations access and restrictions in France and Germany (Schöpfel, et al.); and a case study at Deakin University Library of their self-assessment against the ISO Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification standard (Houghton).

The next four articles describe tool and resource development, including the use of linked data to connect museums, libraries, and archives in Korea (Park); development of the MobileFinder tool for archiving the mobile web (McCown, et al.); the integration of heterogeneous social science resources in the Sowiport information portal (Hienert, et al.); and finally a description of adding tremendous value to the historical collection of Utah Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps by converting them into georeferenced raster datasets (Sorensen). If you have anything at all to do with digital libraries, broadly defined, you should find one or more of this issue's rich collection of articles to be of direct relevance.

About the Editor

Laurence Lannom is Director of Information Services and Vice President at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), where he works with organizations in both the public and private sectors to develop experimental and pilot applications of advanced networking and information management technologies.