As cultural institutions begin to share physical and human resources, and as new technologies reshape approaches to access and preservation, educational programs must respond in kind. However, it is important to ask in what ways the current convergence of libraries, archives, and museums marks a return to tradition rather than a departure from it.…

As library collections increasingly become digital, libraries are faced with many challenges regarding the acquisition and management of electronic resources. Some of these challenges include copyright and fair use, the first-sale doctrine, licensing versus ownership, digital preservation, long-term archiving, and, most important, the issue of…

The preservation of paper-based artifacts is an essential issue for collection management in academic libraries. In recent years, the library science profession has often favored reformatting through microfilm or digitization, assuming too quickly that information matters, whereas an artifact's medium does not. However, much recent humanities…

At the University of Maryland, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from information studies, computer science, education, art, and psychology worked with seven children (ages seven to eleven) to design a new digital library for children. This partnership led to new approaches for collection development, cataloging (metadata standards), and…

Library home pages and digital library sites have many properties and purposes in common with the Baroque wall-system libraries of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Like their Baroque antecedents, contemporary library Web sites exploit the moment of entrance and the experience of the threshold to create and sustain the illusion of a…

Six models are developed to analyze the cost options the University of California faces in providing access to academic journals. The driving force in this analysis is a movement by publishers to deliver the content of their journals via the Internet. The models assume electronic access will always be provided. Researchers like this capability…