DIGITAL LIBRARIES KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Brad Robertson Andrew Verburg Michael Hatheway Gonzalo Masias BA 370 Business Systems Analysis Dr Ren F Reitsma November 2005 0 Abstract This report discusses the new technologies related to Digital libraries The report touches on issues surrounding effective management of knowledge and the various technologies standards organizations and innovations that have been created in order to achieve this goal Technologies such as digital libraries and meta data standards such as the Dublin Core and Dspace organizations like the OCLC and innovations like FEDORA These have all made the management of knowledge more effective and our group s findings on each are discussed in this report Introduction Knowledge is a difficult asset for businesses to keep track of Especially large companies find it very difficult to manage knowledge and its related benefits wasting significant amounts of time and creating information This has been a difficult issue to address as most companies will be hesitant to admit that they are inefficient at holding on to knowledge and the technology had yet to advance enough to allow for proper management During the 1990 s it was a popular topic recording and keeping track of a company s knowledge assets However business was unable to make the technology needed to support this idea and the idea quickly lost its favor in the eyes of the large corporations Libraries however implemented an effective method of keeping track of knowledge Now once the technology is in use by libraries keeping track of knowledge has once again caught on in business Digital library is the term used to describe a catalog of information organized to standards As it is catching on in the business world it becomes something that merits researching This report displays the results of researching several topics related to digital libraries and how they can help business keep track of what they know History The digital library began as most things do An idea formed that was just revolutionary enough to become reality With the invention of computers in the 1940 s a completely new area of the world opened The world now has machines that could do many functions very fast The computer mechanized simple tasks that usually required hours of labor As the speed of these machines would continue to increase the abilities the machines could perform expanded exponentially In 1992 the American military thought it would be a good idea to see if they could get computers to talk to each other over great distances This would help to reduce information transferred through mail or over the phone and also to share resources of information The advantage would be that they could transmit vast amounts of information to each other very quickly thus the Internet was realized and the world became a much larger environment to live in Some of the many scientists that have developed the digital libraries are Calvin Mooers 1950 Perry 1951 and Taube 1955 The digital library was also called Open Literature as it is such that anyone within a company can have access to this documentation The term information retrieval systems IRS was coined in 1980 by Borgman and basically said that all information within such library can be looked up by common phrase or word Automatic indexing was established in 1960 by Salton as a way to automate the old catalog approach 1 As the personal computers became popular in the 1980 s so did the Internet The Internet was used to share information across large areas Many say that the internet is a digital library although it is not In order to be a digital library the internet would need to be organized with a catalog The catalog would act like a library call card except the computer would be searching for the user Current Uses With all the information contained in the Internet community as we know it there is very little uniformity or structure Unfortunately a lot of the information is just clutter created for personal use As an avid reader it would be wonderful if I could borrow a book from a digital domain rather like having to go to the local library For this reason Google today is trying to scan books to follow this same pattern Enter the digital library a process by which hard copy data of all kinds is scanned digitized and stored for future reference Although the technology of scanning is familiar to most the storage space needed is large this is just one of the feasibility problems in having a digital library that resembles a local library Just as with the Internet today there must be some constancy or the vast amount of information is useless In 1995 the Digital Library Federation was created to establish conformity in the American digital library arena It is a consortium of university libraries the Library of Congress and several public libraries to create and maintain a system of control in this new era of time However digital libraries share their own problems Among them are concerns over licensing the dilemma of intellectual property and creating a means by which to classify all the raw data In your local library you may borrow a book with your library card The card implies you have previously paid for the privilege of membership to the institution And with this membership comes the advantage of using the libraries extensive resources The library has already paid for the material and therefore the copyright laws have been satisfied However with a digital library the materials aren t previously paid for by the institution they are licensed by the entity that owns the rights to the information Because of the uniqueness of the digital format a set of standards must be established so that the creators of the data can properly be credited This goes for those who have authored previously published hard copy and those who will author only digital works One of the final problems is the way in which we are to categorize all this information In the local library Dewey decimal classification is used Each book receives its own call number that classifies it into one of 10 categories which are then broken down further These systems are uniform throughout the world making it possible for a visitor in a foreign library to be able to find any book desired Though the digital library is still far behind common libraries in the public s ease of use the amount of information contained there is rapidly increasing The system must connect at a periodic reference point as the