Book: Building Digital Libraries: A How-to-do-it Manual

I am continuing to read and think about digital libraries. As I peeked around the Internet for additional resources, this 2008 book -
Building Digital Libraries: A How-to-do-it Manual - by Terry Reese and Kyle Banerjee came to my attention. Chapters include:

• Planning a Digital Repository
• Acquiring, Processing, Classifying, and Describing Digital Content
• Choosing a Repository Architecture
• General Purpose Technologies Useful for Digital Repositories
• Metadata Formats
• Sharing Data: Metadata Harvesting and Distribution
• Federated Searching of Repositories
• Access Management
• Planning for the Future

In the preface, they provide this reason for the book:

A digital library exists within a very different framework. A single resource (e.g., a portal) may consist of objects in many formats (full-text articles, databases, etc.), yet each of these objects is a resource in its own right. These objects may be updated frequently, and their original formats may become obsolete as technological developments lead to new types of information resources. Due to these differences, creating a digital library requires a new set of skills. Building Digital Libraries: A How-to-do-it Manual® is a tool kit for the new world of digital libraries. It demystifies the challenges of designing, constructing, and maintaining a digital repository.

While we may all us different terms to describe what a digital library is, I like this:

It is not just the information itself, but the organization, structure, and presentation of that information, that give a repository its value.

Those three things - organization, structure and presentation - are concepts that every digital library (and digitization program) should keep in mind. This book seems like a good complement to the Lesk book.

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