Digital Libraries Across Continents illustrates how digital librarianship practitioners and scholars digitize, exhibit, and preserve their cultural heritage, and how these practices may be influenced by the policy, economic, and sociocultural environments in which they are developed.
Including scholarly articles, case studies, examples of best practice, and conceptual essays solicited from different continents, this book provides an overview of the status quo of digital libraries around the globe. The case studies examine how macro-level policy, funding, and social priorities influence the development of digital libraries. The volume offers a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences between libraries in different countries and the ways in which they view, foster, develop, and sustain digital librarianship. Chapters within the book examine systems, standards, workflows, content, protocol, social and policy environments, culture, metadata, and more, through a series of case studies provided by practitioners working in these settings. Taking a comparative international approach, the book promotes the development of inclusive, accessible, and sustainable digital libraries that serve a global human knowledge endeavor.
Digital Libraries Across Continents provides a wide-ranging examination of issues in cross-border digital library contexts. It will be essential reading for library practitioners, as well as information scientists and educators.
List of figures; Introduction: The Evolution and Global Impact of Digital Libraries; Chapter 1: The Bogotá Digital Library: A Transformative Research-Creation Process to Design a Public Digital Library (2016-2020); Chapter 2: Digital Libraries in Germany: Federalism, Funding, and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; Chapter 3: Digital Libraries in China: From “Digital” to “Smart”; Chapter 4: Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence to Support Digital University Libraries in Africa: Opportunities and Challenges; Chapter 5: Digital Libraries as a Powerful Concept for Storing Anonymized Data; Chapter 6: The Use of AI Tools for Enhancing Digital Library Services with Information Architects as Responsible Partners; Chapter 7: Empowering Open: Building and Sustaining an OER Library Repository; Chapter 8: Data Born in Literature: The Biodiversity Heritage Library, a Global Digital Library Serving the Planet; Chapter 9: Navigating Diverse Infrastructure, Multicultural and Multilingual Challenges in International School K-12 Digital Libraries; Chapter 10: An Overview of Digital Libraries in the Caribbean; Chapter 11: Digitized Collections and Provenance Issues: Who Owns What?; Chapter 12: Precedented: Open Digital Research Practices in Latin America; Conclusion: Digital Libraries and Global Knowledge; Index.
Dr. Le Yang is Associate Vice Provost & University Librarian for Collections, Discovery, and Digital Strategy at the University of Oregon Libraries. His research interests include digital librarianship, data governance, and open repositories. Dr. Alicia Salaz is Vice Provost & University Librarian at the University of Oregon Libraries. She has researched in the areas of transnational library practice and how adults learn from reading in print or digital mediums in research with participant populations spanning the globe.
