National Library of Australia Staff Papers, 1996

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Digital Libraries: Some Implications for Government and Education from the Australian Development Experience

Eric Wainwright

Abstract


In the past 2 or 3 years there has been considerable progress in several countries towards realising the concept of the digital library, ie, a service through which collections of documents can be organised and retrieved remotely through online networks. These collections may be very varied, as 'document' has come to describe many types of digital objects, and there are considerable problems in developing successful searching techniques to search across very large heterogenous and distributed collections held in different formats.

It has not been generally understood that the concepts of the digital library are applicable to many other areas. As the World Wide Web becomes a universal means for wide-area inter- connection to information, governments, educational institutions and commercial enterprises are all seeking to present documents in a way that allows them to be visible and retrieved over the Internet.

This paper explores some of the implications of present developments, in the light of experience in developing national library services, and in developing information management strategies for the Australian government.

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