Building Digital Libraries: A How-to-Do-It Manual

Librarians embarking on the challenge of building a digital collection have their work cut out for them and here is the book to help launch and complete the mission! Easy to understand, this guide demonstrates how resources are created, distributed, and accessed and how librarians can keep up with the latest technologies for successfully completing these tasks. Chapters walk you step-by-step through all of the stages. This how-to offers detailed advice for: planning for and assessing the purpose of your digital repository; acquiring, processing, classifying, and describing digital content; storing documents; choosing a platform; specific technologies useful repositories (XML, SOAP, and more); sharing data; federated searching of repositories; understanding issues with allowing/restricting access to information; analyzing repository use, and migrating to other platforms and accommodating new types of data. Librarians looking for a timely, comprehensive guide to creating a digital collection will find this book an invaluable resource.