The above definition extends the sc

The above definition extends the scope of digital libraries in several directions, reflecting the contributions of scholars from a dozen disciplines. It moves beyond information retrieval to include the full life cycle of creating, searching and using information. Rather than simply collecting content on behalf of user communities, it embeds digital libraries in the activities of those communities and it encompasses information-related activities of multiple information institutions.

Like the first initiative, the call for proposals for the Digital Libraries Initiative, Phase II (National Science Foundation, 1998) does not include an explicit definition of the term `digital library'. Rather, the call notes that since the first initiative, ``the definition of a digital library has evolved''. Compared to the first initiative, the DLI-2 call includes far more concern for social, behavioral and economic aspects of digital libraries and identifies research areas that encompass a broader range of academic disciplinesfirefiecting most of the issues raised in the
definition from the Social Aspects of Digital Libraries workshop. Most of the call focuses on research, which is divided into (1) human-centered research, (2) content and collections-based research and (3) systems-centered research. The remainder addresses testbeds and applications. Explicit in the call is a view of digital libraries as a component of a national and international information infrastructure. A sense of service to user communities is implicit in these new directions as well.

Other definitions require that digital libraries contain the full content of information resources in computer-readable form and often assume that they contain more than text alone (Fox et al., 1995; Levy & Marshall, 1995). Lesk (1997), in a book on `practical digital libraries', defines a DL simply as ``a collection of information which is both digitized and organized''. Summarizing a broad array of DL definitions, Bishop and Star (1996) determined that three elements are necessary: (1) some sense of a collection, with some kind of organization; the content may be partly physical and partly electronic, or entirely electronic;(2) a collection that is not entirely bibliographic or exclusively a set of pointers to other material, it must contain some `full-form online material' and may be in a variety of formats;and (3) a goal exists to link ``audience, group, patron, or community with attributes of the collection'', whether in the manner that physical collections are selected for an audience or in the sense of the virtual space that can be created around a community.