Digital Libraries (Tedd)

Book Review : Digital Libraries: Principle and Practice in a Global Environment

The Reviewers

Derek Law, University of Strathclyde

One approaches yet another book on digital libraries with a small sense of weariness and déjà vu. It is good then to find a text which can be recommended, at least within its own objectives. The book comes from two real experts and grows out of a course first delivered at Aberystwyth in 2001. That is not in any sense to imply that it is dated. The material is fresh and up to date, dealing fluently for example with the rapidly developing areas of open access and institutional repositories. The Welsh-Canadian connection also perhaps in part explains the international scope of the book and its welcome if unusual range of examples stretching from Aberystwyth to Asia. It is a basic primer and succinctly covers the gamut of topics described in the wider literature, eschewing critical comment and speculation in favour of sound and well written description.

It is avowedly an introduction and text book and is not perhaps designed to overstretch the reader. It comes close, in fact to being a reference book. The material is divided into bite size chunks, with chapters, sections and subsections. Each one is clearly structured and pithily written with a welcome flowing prose rather than the usual series of bullet points. Like almost all textbooks however it is descriptive rather than analytical, so that, for example it describes but does not review Project Gutenberg and where it has failed as well as where it has succeeded.

The book is positive and bright in tone, very readable and has a welcome balance of material on services as well as content in the digital library. It also aims to go beyond standard Anglo-American models and in particular has a focus on multicultural and multilingual environments. This is a significant strength.

There are of course gaps. However, this reflects more than anything the absence of research and publication on elements of the digital library. One commentator has tellingly described what we have as cabinets of curiosities rather than true digital libraries and there is certainly no general theory here, no economic justification or set of staffing models which can be applied to such libraries. As a consequence the section on running digital libraries consists of a single page on backing up files and user instruction.

The production is a little disappointing, although perhaps hardly the author's fault. Inevitably given the topic, hundreds of URLs are cited. These are simply scattered in the body of the text giving it a particularly inelegant and clumsy look on many pages. For the same reason, the text is littered with screen dumps as a means of showing different interfaces or structures. Reproduction of screens at perhaps twenty per cent of full size gives poor legibility in some cases, while the exclusive use of black and white for the images loses some of the helpful detail and the quality of design.