Library Places and Digital Information Spaces: Reflections on Emerging Network Services

Abstract

The British Library's Initiatives for Access programme aimed to ‘help the Library to come to terms with [digital] technology’. Libraries are institutions that have developed in a print world. They have become important public places, their use has become part of the normal behaviour of readers, and they have evolved a set of practices around the management of print collections. As we move towards a digital age, there are concerns as to how these practices and values should be re-created. It is not yet clear how congenial digital information spaces will be established. In the digital world the emphasis shifts from what can be done in physically constrained places to flows between information repositories and users. Repositories, flow and control will need to be managed and brought together into hospitable ‘information landscapes’. This should be done within a common frame of reference, with agreed standards for (e.g.) resource identification, structures to control differently encoded materials, and appropriate metadata. Users must be presented with services organized around their information uses and behaviour. We are just beginning to imagine what such an information landscape might look like; the World Wide Web offers only a shallow premonition. The challenge to the British Library over the coming years is not only to serve as a central learning place but to organize a social and learning space.