Digital Library Development; the View from Kanazawa (review)

This work is the second volume of a collection of papers presented by leaders in higher education and libraries who attended the annual International Roundtable on Library and Information Science at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology (KIT). KIT and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) have been co-sponsors of the roundtable since 2001. Each year the speakers are invited to discuss and present papers on topics critical to higher education and libraries. This volume includes papers presented from 1999 to 2003. Of the authors represented, most are librarians, and all are leaders in their particular area of expertise

The volume represents a good overview of the pre-2003 state of issues surrounding the development of digital libraries. This is not the book for someone wanting to know the latest standards and technology needed to develop a digital library. Instead, the authors cover a broad range of topics, including an historical overview of libraries by Stanley Chodorow, which is useful for helping both librarians and university administrators understand how libraries fit into the overall university organization, as well as an informed discussion by C. Lee Jones on document delivery and the effect that moving from paper to an electronic format has on libraries and delivery mechanisms.

The success of the volume is in its ability to address a variety of readers and a variety of interests. While one reader may be most interested in ways that technology is changing library organizations, another may want to focus on the copyright implications of digital information. The book is divided into four major sections—"Envisioning the Future," "Facing Major Challenges," "Creating Projects and Programs," and "Developing Digital Libraries." Many readers will find the section "Creating Projects and Programs" particularly useful because of its practical nature. Karin Wittenborg's discussion of trade-offs made by the University of Virginia as it created its Library of the Future is particularly useful because she clearly articulates the financial and personnel stress that can result as libraries change to meet the digital needs of their students and faculty.

The true strength of the volume is the opportunity to have in a single place a snapshot of ideas of some of the major thinkers in libraries and higher education. Its weakness, as might be expected, is the time lag between the presentation of the papers and the date of publication. This is most noticeable in the section on envisioning the future. The digital world is moving at a fast pace; although the information in this section is useful, it does not include some of the newer initiatives such as the University of Rochester's eXtensible catalog, the Digital Library Federation's Aquifer project, or Oregon State University's LibraryFind. Yet, although there are other works covering the subject of digital libraries, the focus of these is either very specific, as in Roy Tennant's Managing the Digital Library (New York: Reed Press, 2004), or they are collections that are very detailed, such as Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (J. Gonzalo et al., eds., Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2006), which is part of the yearly series published by the European Conference on Digital Libraries. Digital Library Development: the View from Kanazawa is a good value for libraries wanting to have a clearly articulated overview of the trends in digital libraries written by leaders in the field. Its general nature makes it a good source of information for campus administrators and information technology directors who may not understand the complexities of the digital library environment. Finally, it can serve as a very general reminder to libraries that developing digital libraries is far more complex than simply acquiring and/or digitizing information, rather it has implications for how the library is organized, how collaborative relationships on campus are built, and how to balance the trade off between pursuing the new while continuing to maintain established systems.