Ian H. Witten
University of Waikato, New Zealand
What will it be like to work in the digital library of the future? We begin
by browsing around an experimental digital library of the present, glancing
at some collections, seeing how they are organized, and noting their enormous
potential for information distribution in developing countries. Then we look
to the future. Although present digital libraries are quite like conventional
libraries, we argue that future ones will feel qualitatively different. Readers--and
writers--will work in the library using a kind of context-directed browsing.
This will be supported by structures derived from automatic analysis of the
contents of the library--not just the catalog, or abstracts, but the full text
of the books and journals--using new techniques of text mining.