D-Lib Magazine
May1999Volume 5 Number 5
ISSN 1082-9873Editorial
The Heterogeneous Digital Library Community
How broad and inclusive is the community of and for digital libraries! I am struck by that thought each month as I begin to gather the scheduled stories, briefings, reviews and other contributed items; pull together the information for the Clips and Pointers section; and search for a special digital library collection to feature in the next issue of D-Lib Magazine.
In any particular issue of the magazine, you will most likely find a mixture of stories, from the very technical to the visionary. This month, for example, we have two quite technical stories, one about the Digital Object Identifier and another about Cornell/CNRI interoperability. We also include a story about the Virtual Naval Hospital digital library project and another story that reports the results of a study of digital library education, both of which are less technical in nature than the first two stories mentioned.
Beginning in January 1999, each issue of D-Lib Magazine has featured an excellent digital library collection. So far, subjects of featured digital library collections have run the gamut, from art (The William Blake Archive in the January issue), to mathematics (The Math Forum in April), to chemistry (The Chemist's Art Gallery in the March issue). The magazine has featured collections of images with views of nature and the environment photographed on Earth (The UC Berkeley Digital Library in February) as well as views of our solar system photographed from space craft journeying to the planets (this month's NASA Planetary Photojournal image collection).
D-Lib Magazine readers include librarians, computer scientists, archivists, educators, doctors, lawyers, electronic publishers and others from so many disciplines and professions it would be difficult to list them all. They are persons who envision digital libraries, create them, provide access to them, keep them operating, research them, improve them, and try to preserve the knowledge held within them. D-Lib Magazine readers are providers, students, and users of digital libraries. They are dreamers and doers.
In addition to the originating D-Lib Magazine site in the United States, the magazine is mirrored in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Germany. The distributed nature of digital libraries and digital library research is even reflected in a partial listing of those responsible for producing D-Lib Magazine. The grant that funds the magazine comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington, Virginia. The principal investigator for the grant is CNRI's Barry Leiner, who is physically located in Sunnyvale, California. The Editor in Chief, William Arms, is at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The Managing Editor -- yours truly -- is a professional librarian employed by CNRI and located in Reston, Virginia.
Digital libraries may not yet have everything, or even something, for everybody, but the digital library community is a diverse and vital community that is increasingly global -- in every sense of the word.
Bonita Wilson
Managing Editor
Copyright (c) 1999 Corporation for National Research Initiatives
Top
| Contents | Next
Search | Author Index | Title Index | Monthly Issues
Letters | E-mail the Editor
DOI: 10.1045/may99-editorial