Neither of the definitions arising

Neither of the definitions arising from the research or practice communities deals explicitly with the plethora of databases that exist on the Internet, the World-Wide Web, on CD-ROMs and on proprietary services such as Dialog, Lexis/Nexis, Westlaw, STN, InfoAmerica and CDB Infotek. Some of these databases and web sites identify themselves as digital libraries, whether for reasons of scholarship, for convenience as a recognizable term or as a marketing ploy. In other cases, surveys of digital libraries include web-based, CD-ROM and other databases within their scope.

These databases fall into a grey area between the definitions constructed by the research and library communities. The lack of fit is not surprising, as neither defiinition was intended to categorize electronic databases. We can say that electronic databases per se are not libraries as institutions or services, in the sense of the DLF definition. Griths (1998) confronts the question of `why the web is not a library'. Her reasons include incompleteness of content, lack of standards and validation, minimal cataloging and ineffective information retrieval. To this we add that the World-Wide Web is not an institution and is not organized on behalf of a specifiable user community. However, one of the services that digital libraries, in the DLF sense, provide is access to electronic databases.

Some portion of electronic databases on the Internet, on proprietary systems and on CD-ROMs are digital libraries in the senses defined by the research community. On a case-by-case basis we can judge the degree to which given databases are organized collections, whether they were created for a specified community and whether their capabilities are sufficient to distinguish them from other forms of information retrieval systems, for example.