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D-Lib Magazine

January/February 2012
Volume 18, Number 1/2

 

Editorial

Continuing Change

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

doi:10.1045/january2012-editorial

 

Most early digital library projects focused on digitizing existing printed material and making it available over the Internet, generally on a collection by collection basis from servers run by the institutions that originally held the physical documents. From that point on, roughly a fifteen to twenty year period, the domain has, from my point of view, gone through dramatic changes, continues to see significant change, and yet still appears to be just at the start of a period of even more significant change. This is not a new thought, not for me and not for many others, but it was strongly reinforced for me in my final review of this month's issue.

We lead with an article by David Shotton in which he proposes a framework for evaluating journal articles, a framework that would have seemed quite alien just a few years ago as it focuses on enriched content, dataset availability, and other largely modern criteria. This is followed by Mitchell and Suchy reporting on mobile access to digital collections through a series of in-depth case studies of a number of institutions and university libraries. The third article in this issue, by Caroli, Scipione, Rrapi, and Trotta, describes the Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works Towards Europeana (ARROW) project, which produced a distributed rights management system for digital libraries and other communities and which will be extended in a follow-up project. In the final article Lewis, de Castro, and Jones examine nine widely divergent scenarios and associated case studies for the use of SWORD in moving data into repositories.

We also have a conference report from Tomasz Neugebauer on the 2011 ICSTI Workshop on Multimedia and Visualization Innovations for Science. This conference is what started me thinking about changes in the digital library domain, since much of the visualization and multimedia projects he reports on are not off in some other world but are tightly connected to libraries and publishing. Understanding and making progress on the issues involved in this area and in the areas covered in our four articles puts the digital library community in a place considerably removed from the early digitization projects.

 

About the Editor

Photo of Laurence Lannom Laurence Lannom is Director of Information Management Technology 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.
 
 
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