[2] The Research Libraries Group, at the beginning of 1995, established a Digital Collection Project Task Force to carry out its Board of Directors' mandate to investigate these issues. The Library of Congress "Digital Library" project makes brief reference to some of these issues as well; see its Strategic Directions Toward a Digital Library: A Working Paper... (LC: September 13, 1994).The "Digital Library Federation" of about 15 major libraries, including Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Michigan, Tennessee and Penn State, was announced formally on May 1, 1995 (information is available from the Commission on Preservation and Access, Washington, DC). The Kellogg Foundation has funded a "Digital Libraries Project" at Harvard under Brian Kahin, but early announcements deal with copyright and general information access without mentioning issues of longevity; "Kellogg Gives Harvard $650K," Library Journal (May 1, 1995), p. 14.
[3]Paul Conway, "Digitizing Preservation," Library Journal (February 1, 1994), p. 42-45. See also Donald J. Waters, Electronic Technologies and Preservation (Washington, DC: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1992); and the 1994 pamphlet from the Commission, The Digital Preservation Consortium: Mission and Goals.
[4] I refer to the Digital Research Library in preference over the "Digital Library," a term preempted and given currency by Vice President Albert Gore, and "virtual library," a companion term brought forth by the National Science Foundation (see, e.g., Thomas J. DeLoughry, "Government Provides $24-Million for 'Virtual Libraries' Projects," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 5, 1994, A26). The announcement for "Digital Libraries '95: The Second International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries" refers to new media and data types, high-speed networks, social and legal issues, and collaboration, but makes no reference to long-term access to information. These terms have so far been used narrowly to define a quantity of data bases available for use at a given time. A library however is not simply a network full of data bases nor a building full of books; it is an organization. A DRL is a set of electronic information organized for the long term.
5 Others will be found listed in 1994 Directory of Electronic Journals and Newsletters, ed. Ann Okerson (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 1994); also at <URL:gopher://arl.cni.org:70/11/scomm/edir>.
[6] A thoughtful beginning at a formal document architecture for a digital library is contained in Anne R. Kenney and Lynne K. Personius, A Testbed for Advancing (Washington, DC: Commission on Preservation and Access, Oct., 1993), Appendix II, "Document Architecture Description," 75-81.
[7] "In this new world, preservation means copying, not physical preservation." Michael Lesk, Preservation of New Technology: A Report of the Technology Assessment Advisory Committee to the Commission on Preservation and Access (Washington, DC: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1992), 13.
[8] Clifford A. Lynch, "The Integrity of Digital Information: Mechanics and Definitional Issues," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45 (1994), 737-744. See also Peter S. Graham, "Preserving the Intellectual Record and the Electronic Environment," Scholarly Communication and the Electronic Environment: Issues for Research Libraries, ed. Robert Sidney Martin (Chicago: ALA, 1993), 71-101.
[9] Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, "How to Time-stamp a Digital Document," Journal of Cryptology 3 (1991) 99-111; also, under the same title, as DIMACS Technical Report 90-80 ([Morristown,] New Jersey: December, 1990). See also D. Bayer, S. Haber and W.S. Stornetta, "Improving the Efficiency and Reliability of Digital Time-stamping," Sequences II: Methods in Communication, Security, and Computer Science, ed. R. M. Capocelli et al (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993), 329-334.
A useful brief account is in Barry Cipra, "Electronic Time-Stamping: The Notary Public Goes Digital", Science 261 (July 9, 1993), 162-163. See also an account of digital time-stamping in the library context in Peter S. Graham, Intellectual Preservation (Washington, DC: Commission on Preservation and Access, March, 1994).
[10] Clifford Lynch, A Framework for Identifying, Locating, and Describing Networked Information Resources (March 24, 1993; electronic "Draft for discussion at March-April 1993 IETF Meeting"), n.p., section "Referencing Parts of Objects" (my citation in this form exemplifies the problem).
[11] L. Burnard, What is SGML and How Does it Help? TEI document TEI ED W25,
October 1991, available from TEI fileserver (listserv@uicvm.uic.edu; send the line "get TEI-L filelist"); International Organization for Standards, ISO 8879: Information Processing - Text and Office Systems - Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), ISO, 1986; Eric van Herwijnen, Practical SGML (Kluwer, 1991); C. M. Sperberg-McQueen and Lou Burnard, eds. Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI P3). (2 vols.) Chicago, Oxford: Text Encoding Initiative, 1994 (and available by anonymous ftp from <URL:ftp://ftp-tei.uic.edu/pub/tei>.
[12] Lynch, in Framework proposes "that the emphasis be on describing content...rather than access mechanisms" ([[section]]"Cataloging Networked Information Resources").
[13] Tim Berners-Lee. July 14, 1993. Uniform Resource Locators [online, as <ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-uri-url-01.txt> (or ...-01.ps).There is a good deal of more recent work in this area being done by IETF groups (for current status, see <URL:http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/1id-abstracts.html>. See also MARBI Proposal 93-4 (Nov. 20, 1992), p. 5 ff, for comments on the possible relations between the URL and the proposed MARC field 856 (Electronic Location and Access); and MARBI Proposal 94-3 (Dec. 6, 1993), which specifically proposes adding a subfield $u to field 856 to accommodate a URL.
[14] For a further description of this potential for integration see Peter S. Graham, "The Mid-Decade Catalog," in ALCTS Newsletter (January, 1994), pp. A-D.
[15] Martin Dillon et al, Assessing Information on the Internet (Dublin, Ohio: OCLC, 1993).
[16] References to the need or long-term commitment are beginning to appear. Paul Conway, and Jim Barker at Case Western Reserve's Library, have called attention to it (Conway, "Digitizing Preservation," p. 44). A rare example in the computing community is in John A. Kunze, Functional Requirements for Internet Resource Locators (IETF URI Working Group Internet-Draft, 27 July 1994), [[section]]4, "Resource Access and Availability" <URL:ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-uri-rl-fun-req-01.txt>.
[17] See, for example, Jerome Saltzer, "Technology, Networks, and the Library of the Year 2000", in Future Tendencies in Computer Science, Control, and Applied Mathematics, (Lecture Notes in Computer Science 653), edited by A. Bensoussan and J.-P. Verjus, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1992, pages 51-67; also available at <URL:http://ltt-www.lcs.mit.edu/ltt-www/ Papers/inria.html>. See also the works mentioned of Berners-Lee and the IETF groups working on the URI (the group working on the Uniform Resource Characteristics (URC), however, would benefit from more exposure to cataloging principles; see <URL: ftp://ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/ internet-drafts/draft-ietf-uri-urc-req-01.txt> [expired and unavailable when pointed to Nov. 13, 1995; but see RFC 1738, <URL:http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1738.txt>...pg]).
[18] The national libraries are the great exceptions, such as those of Britain, Russia, France and the United States. Exceptions in this country include the handful of independent research libraries such as the Folger, the Huntington and the American Antiquarian Society, and some of the great civic institutions such as the Boston and New York Public Libraries. For the possibility of the link between research libraries and universities being lost, see the 1991 Malkin Lecture of Terry Belanger, The Future of Rare Book Libraries (Charlottesville: Book Arts Press, in preparation; text available from Dec. 16, 1991 archive of ExLibris, a listserv at rutvm1.rutgers.edu, message from: terry@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu, subject: Malkin Lecture).
[19] Michael Buckland, "Putting It Together: The Principles of Information Access," presentation at the ALCTS Institute, The Electronic Library: Administrative Issues for Organization and Access (San Antonio: October 29, 1994).