Building Large-Scale Digital Libraries

Schatz, Bruce R. and Chen, Hsinchun (1996) Building Large-Scale Digital Libraries. IEEE Computer, Special Issue on Building Large-Scale Digital Libraries 29(5):pp. 22-27.

Abstract

In this era of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the long-time topic of digital libraries has suddenly become white hot. As the Internet expands, particularly the WWW, more people are recognizing the need to search indexed collections. Digital library research projects thus have a common theme of bringing search to the Net. This is why the US government made digital libraries the flagship research effort for the National Information Infrastructure (NII), which seeks to bring the highways of knowledge to every American. As a result, the four-year, multiagency DLI was funded with roughly $1 million per year for each project (see the “Agency perspectives” sidebar). Six projects (chosen from 73 proposals) are involved in the DLI, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This issue of Computer includes project reports from these six university sites: Carnegie Mellon University, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, and Stanford University.