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Expresses the opinion that electronic books will not completely replace print books. Types of literature for which electronic books will prove useful, including educational and technical literature; Challenges presented by the management of device-dependent e-books in libraries; Several companies which provide device-independent, or Web-based, e-books; Where to find information about e-books.

The following is an editorial by Roy Tennant, Manager, eScholarship Web & Services Design, California Digital Library. I recently took library catalogs to task for being the wrong solution for the right problem--general information discovery. But I believe that federated or cross-database search tools now available on the market are the correct solution for unifying access to a variety of information resources. These tools can search not only library catalogs but also commercial abstracting and indexing databases, web search engines, and a variety of other databases, while often merging and de-duplicating (a.k.a. de-duping) results. The market is still in an early stage of development, with products varying quite a bit in features, stability, and ease of implementation. While some libraries may be perfectly happy doing a minimum amount of configuration to the" out of the box" interfaces of these products, a significant number of libraries will not.

Discusses innovations in digital reference since 1999. Advent of the annual conference of the Virtual Reference Desk; E-mail and chat reference; Types of digital reference software; Low numbers of users of the technology; Critics who raise questions about digital reference; Opinion that digital reference is still in its early stages.

Examines libraries' MARC bibliographic standards. Lack of hierarchical relationships in books; Problem with union catalogs; Difficulty in changing MARC; Different exit strategies; Possibility of a complete transition to a reformed set of bibliographic standards.

Presents the opinion of the author about machine-readable cataloging (MARC). Problems with MARC records; Opinion that MARC has outlived its usefulness; Belief that MARC lacks essential checks and balances to assure that appropriate granularity is achieved when coding a record; Problems that MARC creates for catalogers and users; Comparison of MARC with XML; Limits of MARC in the marketplace.

Discusses institutional repositories that accept deposits of scholarly papers at universities. Benefits of repositories; Web-based systems; Software systems, such as ePrints from the University of Southampton in Great Britain and DSpace, developed through a partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries and Hewlett-Packard; Implementation models, including distributed and semidistributed models; Open Archives Initiative Harvesting Protocol; Economic models; Subject terminologies; Publication and removal.

Explores the adoption of wireless networking by libraries across the U.S. Security concerns; Issues of wireless standards; Selection of academic libraries that have wireless access.

Focuses on Web services which would knit software applications together to construct new services. Definition of Web services; Information on the Web services being developed by the Portuguese National Library; Features of the digital library system of the Washington Research Library Consortium; Method by which a specific Web Service is described.

Focuses on fostering library innovation projects. Need for managers to make staff comfortable with sharing their ideas in order to foster innovation within an organization; Feeling that staff should have the opportunity to share their ideas in an open atmosphere; Allocation of resources to support an idea; Idea that prepared responses to failed innovation and to the unexpected are necessary in the planning.

Focuses on the dependence of libraries on metadata. Role of metadata granularity; How digital data is sorted and tagged in a database; Way that granularity makes it possible to distinguish one piece of metadata from another; Issue of compliance with standards.

Discusses the use of metadata in digital library work. Definition of metadata; How excellent metadata is constructed; Use of containers for metadata; Importance of solving a problem people care about; Various containers that can be used, including MARC, the Dublin Core, Metadata Encoding and Transfer Syntax (METS), and Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS); Need for metadata containers to qualify information; Importance of guidelines on how containers should be used.

Discusses what can be done to protect digital library services and collections from disasters. Techniques for disaster prevention, including storage of data on hard disks using Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) technology; Importance of backing up data; Methods of emergency response and recovery if a Web site crashes.

Discusses the idea to combine database services to make research easier for users. Benefits of individual databases; Idea for cross-database search services; Discussion of California Digital Library's Searchlight system, the National Library of Medicine's Gateway system and others.

Discusses the outlook for electronic books, or e-books. Comment that device-dependent e-books, such as those marketed by Gemstar, are unlikely to be a widespread success; Significance of libraries, universities and others which publish e-books for free on the Internet; Mention of National Academy Press, eScholarship and UC Press; Outlook for online publishing.

Focuses on digital library projects. Explanation of digital library research projects; How production digital library projects meet user needs with existing technologies; Examples of librarian-computer scientist projects; What librarians and computer scientists can learn from each other.

Discusses copyright laws. How laws protecting copyright are unenforceable; Reference to the music-file sharing site Napster; Way in which technology allows for content to be shared easily; Distribution of free content; Thoughts on the restrictiveness of the digital copyright laws.

Explains how librarians can use Extensible Markup Language (XML) to create and manage digital library services and collections. The benefits of XML over Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML); How XML works; XML and software; XML and structured information; XML and digital publishing; XML toolbox; Comparison of XML and the MARC electronic bibliographical format.

Discusses the importance of interoperability among digital library projects and materials. Model for creating a union catalog established by the Library of Congress and Ameritech, which controlled funding; Details of the Picture Australia project and its challenges.

Discusses the benefits to libraries of co-branding, which enables an organization to purchase content or service while making it appear as it own. Loss of library assistance from a library web site once a user chooses a database to search; How the Librarians' Index to the Internet (LII) provides co-branding to libraries which allows a patron to return to the library web site after they have chosen a database to search; Ability of co-branding to change the appearance of a site while retaining its content.

Offers a look at various information technologies that the author believes are dead. His thoughts on Structured Generalized Markup Language, Resource Description Framework, electronic books and Java; Reasons for the outdated nature of the technologies.

Discusses the effect peer-to-peer networks may have on libraries and information retrieval. Description of Napster, which is not completely peer-to-peer and is vulnerable to being shut down; Description of Gnutella, which is completely peer-to-peer and not vulnerable to being shut down; Development of Gnutella by America Online's Nullsoft to compete with Napster; How libraries could possibly use Gnutella to develop and improve services.

Discusses licensing, which has become one of the techniques used by librarians to acquire content along with traditional acquisition methods. Problems and questions raised by the licensing of access to digital material; Consortial licensing; Difficulty of purchasing digital content; Possibility of borrowing information from other libraries' online collections; Role of gifts and grants; Free material on the Internet.

Discusses access to electronic theses and dissertations (ETD). Methods for making ETD available online which include hiring commercial companies like UMI Dissertation Services or using XML format; Universities which lead the ETD effort; Main methods for locating ETD online including UMI's ProQuest Digital Dissertations Site and web sites of members of the Networked Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD); Small number of ETD that are available.

Profiles the Digital Library Federation whose purpose is to serve its membership by helping to solve pressing digital library problems. Four key objectives of the Federation; History of the group; The Making of America II project which aims to develop a method and syntax for encoding complex digital objects in a standard way; Future outlook for the Federation.

Focuses on the establishment of Open Archives, a multiple digital library collection, and how it is designed to develop an open architecture that supports simultaneous searching and retrieval of papers from disparate archives. Information on the arXiv e-Print archive at the Los Alamos National Laboratory; Networked Computer Science Technical Reports (NCSTRL); The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD); NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS).

Reports on various library databases. Computer workstations; Use of servers such as Sprite; Details of the Structured Query Language (SQL); Other databases.

Presents an overview of user interface design used by libraries to create electronic resources for patrons. Importance of the design being consistent and efficient; Keeping in contact with users to collect feedback about the system.

Discusses the need for outsourcing to digitize libraries. Reference to 'Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives,' by Anne R. Kenney and Stephen Chapman; Kodak PhotoCD as an option for in-house digitizing methods; Request for Proposal (RFP) as a tool for competitive bidding; Guidelines for creating RFP according to the Research Libraries Group; Suggestions.

Presents an overview of copyright and intellectual property rights for electronic publishing. Details of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in October 1998, in the United States; Efforts of authors and journalists to copyright material published over the Internet; Ways to determine copyright status.

Focuses on digital libraries. Confusion of users by the presence of the variety of online information resources; Creation of personalized sites as a solution; My Yahoo by Yahoo; Features of the My Library system at the Virginia Commonwealth University; Efforts at other universities; MyLibrary@NCState of North Carolina State University, chosen as the best by the periodical `Library Journal'; How users can customize; Contact information.

Reports on the efforts to create digital libraries that are more user friendly. Involvement of the Library of Congress and the American Library Association; Use of E-mail in helping researchers find information; Details of the Internet Public Library (IPL) a project of the University of Michigan School of Information; Use of videoconferencing.

Discusses ways of making a digital collection accessible in libraries. Goals of access; Questions to ask; Using a variety of methods and interfaces; Functional interaction issues; Questions about cataloging; Downsides to access; Avoiding technology overkill; Making improvements; Customizing access.

Discusses the preservation of library materials and the difficulties in preserving digital information. Accepted preservation formats for nondigital information; The threat of technological obsolescence; Report from the Research Libraries Group that outlines the dilemmas of digital preservation and the need for a strategy to deal with the problem; The proposed migration strategy; The need for central repositories; Other information. INSET: Link List.

Discusses emerging digital formats for the Internet. The GIF and JPEG formats currently used; Viewing these images; New formats such as the GridPix, MrSID, Flashpix and JTIP; OpenPix and PNG; Flashpix and PNG preferred.

Presents resources for digital imaging projects. Variables involved depending on the project; Questions needing to be answered for a given project; Resources from the United States Library of Congress (LC) and the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); Understanding underlying technical issues; Use of Kodak materials; List of published and Internet resources.

Examines option for cataloguing digital and print versions of library materials. Drawbacks and benefits of the options; Creating one catalogs for all materials; Side-by-side catalogs; Combination catalogs.

Focuses on digital librarianship and its resources. Online resources; The Institute on Digital Library Development; DigLibns.; Project documentation; Courses or workshops; Digital Imaging for Libraries and Archives; LITA Regional Institutes; Research Libraries Group; The School for Scanning; UK Office of Library Networking; Site visits; Internships.

Discusses the development of digital libraries. How machine-readable cataloging (MARC) affected digital libraries; Selecting, acquiring, organizing, accessing and preserving digital content; Interoperability; Standards; Rights management; Preservation; Resources; User interface design.

Discusses the nature of digital libraries as an introduction to this column as a regular feature of the magazine. Assertion that digital library collections will enhance rather than replace regular library collections; Qualities of a digital library; Examples of digital library projects.

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the September 15, 2012 announcement that Francine Fialkoff is leaving her editorial role at "Library Journal" magazine, in which the letter writer expresses his gratitude for Fialkoff's willingness to include his Digital Libraries column.

A personal narrative is presented which explores the author's experience with changing technologies throughout his library science career.

This article discusses the increasing popularity of digital libraries and the impact they are having on resource allocation decisions. The author looks forward to a day that the "digital" moniker can be dropped and when the word "libraries" will encompass physical spaces, collections, and services provided in person as well as virtual spaces, collections, and services.

The author reports on a meeting organized by the Library of Congress's Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control to discuss the future of bibliographies. Discussed at the meeting was the complexity of the current system and the number of fields not being used. Changes will occur on how collections are described as well as the resources people use.

The editorial presents commentary regarding the updating and revision of library cataloging guidelines, particularly the formation of the Resource Description and Access guidelines. The author describes the various difficulties involved in the formation of such a broad system of cataloging rules and suggests the project will be of limited use even after completion.

In this article the author discusses the 2006 decision by the PINES library consortium of Georgia to use an intergrated library system that had been developed in-house. The article examines options for libraries seeking an open source solution for their integrated library systems. The author states that open source systems save significant amounts of money compared to commercial systems.

In this article, the author presents his strategy for coping with constant change in libraries. He warns readers to guard their data with their lives, explains the importance of flexibility when it comes to new technologies and having an exit strategy from outdated technology, and to learn a technology only well enough to do what must be done.

The article presents one person's reaction to a 2006 visit to and the content of a library summit called the "Summit on Technology and Change in Academic Libraries," which was organized by approximately 30 individuals from libraries, higher education and the private sector, which focused on key questions facing the future of academic libraries.

The author explores how massive digitization projects by Google and the Open Content Alliance promise to change forever the way people find and use books. He asserts that, according to Google, we are only a few years away from having the entire collections of large research libraries completely digitized and searchable. He considers the implications this has on libraries and explains actions that are being taken by the Online Computer Library Center.

The article discusses the danger of predicting future technological trends. The author points out that many people were expecting "teletext" to revolutionize information retrieval, however the system become obsolete with the advent of the Internet. Making predictions based on narrow assumptions is a common but dangerous practice, and the author offers advice on avoiding pitfalls.