Abstract

Manfred Thaller, From the Digitized to the Digital Library

È diviso in paragrafi con 'thesis' e 'discussion'. Eccoli: 1. Who should be addressed by digital libraries? How shall we measure whether we have reached the desired audience? Thesis: The primary audience for a digital library is neither the leading specialist in the respective field, nor the freshman, but the advanced student or young researcher and the "almost specialist". The primary topic of digitization projects should not be the absolute top range of the "treasures" of a collection, but those materials that we always have wanted to promote if they were just marginally more important. Whether we effectively serve them to the appropriate community of serious users can only be measured according to criteria that have yet to be developed. 2. The appropriate size of digital libraries and their access tools Thesis: Digital collections need a critical, minimal size to make their access worthwhile. In the end, users want to access information, not metadata or gimmicks. 3. The quality of digital objects Thesis: If digital library resources are to be integrated into the daily work of the research community, they must appear on the screen of the researcher in a quality that is useful in actual work. 4. The granularity / modularity of digital repositories Thesis: While digital libraries are self-contained bodies of information, they are not the basic unit that most users want to access. Users are, as a rule, more interested in the individual objects in the library and need a straightforward way to access them. 5. Digital collections as integrated reference systems Thesis: Traditional libraries support their collections with reference material. Digital collections need to find appropriate models to replicate this functionality. 6. Library and teaching Thesis: The use of multimedia in teaching is as much of a current buzzword as the creation of digital collections. It is obvious that they should be connected. A clear-cut separation of the two approaches is nevertheless necessary.

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