The cultural heritage preservation community now functions largely within the environment of digital technologies. This article begins by juxtaposing definitions of the terms "digitization for preservation" and "digital preservation" within a sociotechnical environment for which Google serves as a relevant metaphor. It then reviews two reports…

This article reports on patterns of links from and to the Web sites of 100 U.S. academic and public libraries with regard to the originating and targeted URL domain categories. Libraries, grouped into small and large by their collection size, were found to have numbers of inlinks proportional to their size, but public libraries, and particularly…

Much contemporary library thinking and planning hinges on the belief that the true telos (or mission) of libraries is to merge into the new electronic environment, usually referred to metonymically as "the Internet." In this article, I argue that those who propagate the Internet as the coming information paradise, subsuming and superseding…

Archaeologists have used material artifacts found in a physical space to gain an understanding about the people who occupied that space. Likewise, as users wander through a digital library, they leave behind data-based artifacts of their activity in the virtual space. Digital library archaeologists can gather these artifacts and employ inductive…

What is the state of intellectual freedom and libraries in the early twenty-first-century digital environment? This question is addressed largely in relation to public and school libraries, where more than 90 percent of documented challenges exist and at which most legislative and judicial actions relevant to intellectual freedom and libraries are…

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…