The goals of DLI-1 were modest by t

The goals of DLI-1 were modest by today's standards. Research was supported in three
areas:
1) capturing data and metadata of all forms (text, images, sound, speech, etc.) and categorizing and organizing them,
(2) advanced software and algorithms for browsing,searching, filtering, abstracting, summarizing and combining large volumes of data, imagery and all kinds of information and
(3) the utilization of networked databases distributed around
the nation and around the world.

The notion of a digital library and goals for research continue to be refined through workshops, conferences and scholarly writing. A 1995 NSF workshop that addressed scaling and interoperability issues in digital libraries resulted in several definitions, the most general of which defines a digital library as a system that provides ``a community of users with coherent access to a large, organized repository of information and knowledge'' (Lynch & Garcia-Molina, 1995). Content, collection and community all are included in this definition, as well as the requirement that the content be organized.
One of the primary outcomes of the NSF-sponsored Social Aspects of Digital Libraries
workshop was a definition of the term `digital libraries'. We broadened the scope to encompass two complementary ideas (Borgman et al., 1996):