Requirements for the future digital library

Politicians give us many reasons to worry, and I don't usually hold them up for public praise.But there is one thing politicians often do extremely well-they describe things in simple terms that everyone can understand.Al Gore, for example, when describing the virtues of technology, painted a verbal picture of a day when the contents of the Library of Congress would be available, online, to every school child in America.Librarians across the country winced at that notion, particularly when they heard Gore's description paraphrased by local administrators and trustees.Collectively librarians protested-"No, no, that image is too simple.We can't put everything online.We don't have enough money.We don't have all the legally required rights and permissions."Also, perhaps most vehemently, we librarians protested that not everything that could or should be digitized is in the Library of Congress.Our reaction was, to be blunt, a mistake.We missed an opportunity to capitalize on a politician's vision.We lapsed into our usual professional concerns and institutional territoriality.Instead, we should have given the answer that I will give today to Karen's question-"What do we have to do to realize the potential of digital libraries?"My answer is simple: we must build massive, comprehensive digital collections that scholars, students, and other researchers can use even more easily than they use the book-based collections we have built up over the centuries.I do not say that building massive, widely accessible digital collections, in which I include library-acquired as well as library-created materials, will be easy.I do not say that it will be inexpensive.I do not say that libraries will magnanimously rush to collaborate to achieve it.And I do not say that we can readily unravel the complexities of linking libraries for users worldwide.But I do say that making much more content much more accessible is a great and worthy goal.If we could make it possible for every student in America-and for everyone else, in less favored countries, in repressed countries, indeed anywhere in the world with access to computers-to use those computers as doorways to the libraries of the world, that would be an achievement truly worthy of the ingenious technologies that are beginning to make it possible.To achieve such a goal, I believe that the digital library of the future will develop three overall characteristics.• It will be a comprehensive collection of resources important for scholarship, teaching and learning.• It will be readily accessible to all types of users, novices as well as the experienced.• It will be managed and maintained by professionals who see their role as stewards of the intellectual and cultural heritages of the world.Also, I believe that achieving these things will require a fundamental transformation of the institutions we now call libraries.