Our Goal

*The Digital Online Library will be essential to the success of libraries, to all the scholars and researchers, and useful to higher education in general. Its value as a collaborative organization will transcend the efforts of any individual member, and it will be a recognized and respected leader in the national and international digital library communities.

Researchers, teachers, and learners across the world will consider the resources and technologies provided by the  Digital Library to be invaluable. Scholarly materials collected and disseminated through a digital no. will be used to solve scientific and policy dilemmas; instructional materials will be used to improve the quality of education; and unique digital collections will make learning come alive everywhere.

It will lead the way forward during changing times by working toward a scholarly communication system that makes research and learning materials easily available to anyone, anywhere, and at any time. It will be an advocate for Open Access to scholarly work, and it will be instrumental in leading libraries to a more active role in publishing research materials. Additionally, this digital no. will participate in the changing nature of university education, providing crucial support in the development of quality distance learning programs for all the educational. Every library in the world will be a member in the Digital Online Library. The mission of this is to contribute to research, scholarship, and the common good by collaboratively collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of individual knowledge.

Main features and Goals

1. To promote and support the scholarly use of digital content and networked information resources by researchers and students;
2. To digitize and offer network access to unique and rare collections of materials from the libraries, museums, and archives of a digital no.;
3. To increase the number and range of digital resources available for faculty and students;
4. To offer digital library services and supporting technologies that are sustainable, scalable, compatible with the institutional infrastructure, and interoperable with national and international digital library initiatives;
5. To discover and promote currently available digital technologies that can revitalize and enhance research, teaching, and learning;
6. To address key research questions that balance the importance of user, content, and systems issues in digital library development;
7. To conduct a program of research to advance the state of knowledge and practice in digital libraries, and the social, organizational, technological, and human factors involving the uses and users of digital libraries;
8. To collaborate with colleagues at other colleges, universities, and research libraries, nationally and internationally in the development of an inter-institutional and international federation of distributed digital libraries;
9. To establish a national and international reputation for developing a premier digital library in the world.
10. The implementation of a distributed, open digital library conforming to the overall theme and accessible across the global Internet.
11. This library shall consist of collections and preservation of data for expanding over time in number and scope and to be created from the conversion to digital form of documents contained in our and other libraries and archives, and from the incorporation of holdings already in electronic form.
12. The establishment of a collaborative management structure to coordinate and guide the implementation and ongoing maintenance of the digital library; to set policy regarding participation, funding, development and access; to encourage and facilitate broad involvement; and to address issues of policy and practice that may inhibit full citizen access.
13. The development of a coordinated funding strategy that addresses the need for support from both public and private sources to provide the means to launch initiatives at our and other institutions.
14. The formation of selection guidelines that will ensure conformance to the general theme, while remaining sufficiently flexible and open-ended to accommodate local initiatives and projects; and to ensure that the digital library comprises a significant and large corpus of materials.
15. The adoption of common standards and best practices to ensure full informational capture; to guarantee universal accessibility and interchangeability; to simplify retrieval and navigation; and to facilitate achievability and enduring access.
16. The involvement of leaders in government, education, and the private sector to address issues of network policy and practice that may inhibit full citizen access.
17. The establishment of an ongoing and comprehensive evaluation program to study: How scholars and other researchers, students of all levels, and citizens everywhere make use of the digital library for research, learning, discovery, and collaboration;
18. To develop cost-effective and robust infrastructure for digital content of value to scholars and researchers, including a variety of formats and born-digital materials.
19. To develop partnerships and services that ensures preservation of the materials in a form of digital no. and the entire print and digital scholarly record.
20. To reduce long-term capital and operating costs of storage and care of print collections through redoubled efforts to coordinate shared storage strategies among libraries.
21. To build infrastructure that facilitates cost-effective and productive collaborations among partnering institutions to reduce the cost of securing campus intellectual assets.
22. To define and make available a set of services that supports research using a digital no..
23. To create a technical framework that allows for both central and distributed creation of tools and services.
24. To sustain this enterprise as a “public good” while at the same time defining a set of services that benefits member institutions.
25. How such usage compares with that of traditional libraries and other sources of information;
26. How digital libraries affect the mission, economics, staffing, and organization of libraries and other institutions; and
27. How to design systems to encourage access by individuals representing a broad spectrum of interests.
28. To build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive co-owned and co-managed digital archive of library materials converted from the print collections of the member institutions.