Understanding Digital Libraries

This fully revised and updated second edition of Understanding Digital Libraries focuses on the challenges faced by both librarians and computer scientists in a field that has been dramatically altered by the growth of the Web.

At every turn, the goal is practical: to show you how things you might need to do are already being done, or how they can be done. The first part of the book is devoted to technology and examines issues such as varying media requirements, indexing and classification, networks and distribution, and presentation. The second part of the book is concerned with the human contexts in which digital libraries function. Here you'll find specific and useful information on usability, preservation, scientific applications, and thorny legal and economic questions.


. Useful for digital library projects in all kinds of settings, including commercial and community ventures, museums, research institutions, and schools.
. Covers the entire spectrum of media, including text, all kinds of images, audio, and video.
. Provides practical advice on achieving the best of what is possible while avoiding common pitfalls.
. Filled with case studies and references to valuable outside resources.

(Elsevier)

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"Lesk is the senior and most knowledgeable author in the field. His dry humor and clear explanations, combined with his uncanny ability to uncover and address key ideas and problems, make this a "must read."
--Edward A. Fox, Ph.D., Professor of Computer Science, Virginia Tech

"Michael Lesk does for digital libraries what David Macaulay does for every day objects: he lucidly depicts how things work. In the digital world the ways things work is necessarily always in flux. In this second edition, Michael Lesk has done a masterful job of making us feel more at home with this flux."
--Michle Valerie Cloonan, Dean and Professor, Graduate School of Library & Information Science, Simmons College

"Lesk's insights are distilled from a lifetime of pioneering activities in information retrieval, text processing and digital libraries, culminating in a most creative period at the National Science Foundation. He has written a book that brings these insights alive with well-chosen examples: facts and figures, tables and graphs. Digital libraries have not replaced books. This book illustrates why."
--William Y. Arms, Professor of Computer Science and Co-Director of Information Science, Cornell University

(Elsevier)

Michael Lesk joined the computer science research group at Bell Laboratories after receiving his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Physics in 1969. He went on to manage the computer science research group at Bellcore, where he is now a chief research scientist. He is best known for his work in electronic libraries, but has worked in document production and retrieval software, computer networks, computer languages, and human-computer interfaces as well. Past chair of the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest groups on Language Analysis and Information Retrieval, Lesk was Senior Visiting Fellow of the British Library in 1987 and is currently Visiting Professor of Computer Science at University College London. Lesk has been recently elected to the US National Academy of Engineering, in recognition of his contributions to UNIX applications, information systems, and digital libraries.

(Elsevier)

Chapter 1 Evolution of Libraries Chapter 2 Text documents Chapter 3 Images of pages Chapter 4 Multimedia storage and access Chapter 5 Knowledge representation schemes Chapter 6 Distribution Chapter 7 Usability and Retrieval Evaluation Chapter 8 Collections and Preservation Chapter 9 Economics Chapter 10 Intellectual property rights Chapter 11 International Activities Chapter 12 Future: ubiquity, diversity, creativity, public policy

(Elsevier)