A personal history of digital libraries

This paper aims to present a personal view of the development of digital libraries, starting with the original vision of 1945 and describing how it came to the dominance of online searching and reading that it has today.

Progress in digital libraries is described in four areas: technical, economic, legal and social issues. Originally technological obstacles were dominant, but they have generally been overcome by progress in computers, networks, and algorithms. Economic issues have also faded, although “open access” questions still bedevil us. Surprisingly, libraries are now faced with more serious legal obstacles than first expected; no one today can start a digital library effort without thinking about copyright. Social issues are likely to be the next set of challenges.

The transformation of searching and reading has been almost complete. Scholars in scientific disciplines, in particular, often function quite well with only rare visits to a library to read physical books. Even in the area of entertainment reading, it can be seen that the e‐reader devices now dominating. These results have been a combination of new research results and new commercial activities, with perhaps less progress by publishers and libraries than one might have hoped.

The development of digital libraries has been a complex mixture of change: there are ideas which were invented long before users or companies were ready for them, and other ideas (such as search engines) which appeared suddenly when opportunities arose. The complexities of technology, economics, law and society are still in the process of being understood as they either enable or block new services. However, looking back, it can be seen that essentially the entire vision of 1945 is in sight and other large improvements in complex systems and how they are helped or impeded in their progress may be learned from this story.