The scope of digital library research
The term ‘digital library’ is a source of much
debate and confusion1. In this article, we take
the term to mean a distributed library information
service, located either in a physical or
a virtual space, or a combination of both, in
which a significant proportion of the resources
available to users of that service exist only in
digital form. We thus distinguish the digital library
from the ‘electronic library’, which simply
provides access to a range of material in
digitised form within the framework of a traditional
library, and ‘hybrid’ or ‘gateway’ libraries,
which lie somewhere on a continuum
between the traditional and the digital library,
with electronic and paper-based sources integrated
and used alongside one another. Proponents
of the hybrid library regard it as a
worthwhile model in its own right, others
merely as a transitional state between traditional
and digital libraries.