Digital Libraries / The Fourth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, August 11-14, 1999, Berkeley, CA.

Abstract

Digital libraries are the digital counterparts of traditional libraries of books and periodicals. They hold digital representations in minimally structured formats for all kinds of archival human-readable information ("documents"). Primarily they contain text, but now increasingly they include multimedia data like images, audio, and video. Usually digital libraries are distinguished from database systems (see Distributed Databases and Distributed File Systems), data archives (see Data Warehousing), and "knowledge bases" for artificial intelligence (see Knowledge) that all hold well-structured data. They are often implemented as services on the Internet, and many have World Wide Web interfaces (see Internet, Network Architecture, and World Wide Web). In fact, the World Wide Web can be considered as one big digital library. Digital libraries are the most important kind of "information retrieval" system.