Digital Libraries and Electronic Resources

This article reviews available cost-effective options libraries have for updating and maintaining pathfinders such as subject guides and course pages. The paper discusses many of the available options, from the standpoint of a mid-sized academic library which is evaluating alternatives to static-HTML subject guides. Static HTML guides, while useful, have proven difficult and time-consuming to maintain. The article includes a discussion of open source database-driven solutions (such as SubjectsPlus, LibData, Research Guide, and Library Course Builder), Wikis, and social tagging sites like del.icio.us. This article discusses both the functionality and the relative strengths and weaknessess of each of these options.

Stephen G. Nichols tells of creating a digital library of manuscripts of the <i>Romance of the Rose</i>, the most popular vernacular French romance of the Middle Ages. The scholarly rationale for the digital library project proved the easy part. Nichols also shares the complex, technical steps of digitizing the manuscripts.

A survey explored scholar’s attitudes about educational technology environments in the humanities.

The key to a successful repository is sustained deposits, and the key to sustained deposits is community engagement. This article looks at deposit profiles automatically generated from OAI harvesting information and argues that repositories characterised by occasional large-volume deposits are a sign of a failure to embed in institutional processes. The ideal profile for a successful repository is discussed, and a new service that ranks repositories based on these criteria is implemented.

The collective expertise of digital libraries in making available the diverse literatures of science and artistic expression, in concert with the increasing sophistication of commercial partners and the development of distributed, interactive forms of publishing, require libraries to chart the engineering of new architectures for teaching, learning, and research. Digital libraries must work to forge the new collaborations required to enable and build these services.