Many are looking forward to a time when going to the library will be unnecessary. Already many students rely entirely on information found online, even when that information is inferior.

Increasingly, digital collections do exist, created by large profit-making enterprises and as special projects by libraries and library consortiums. But there is not yet a complete digital library available. It has long been a dream of librarians and others to pull together digital materials and create a revolutionary library. But a number of obstacles stand in the way.

"Tantalizing as it is to contemplate a grand, Internet-based archive of all written human knowledge-a 21st century spin on the fabled Library of Alexandria-there's little hope of such a thing emerging anytime soon. The concept is fraught with problems. Even if large digital collections are becoming commonplace on the Internet, the means to tap them remains elusive." (bibliotech.usc Winter 1998)

Issues to confront:

• How will the systems inter-operate? There is a lack of a single digital standards which everyone will use.
• How will the digital library materials be cataloged?
• What type of search engine would be needed? It would have to be phenomenally complex.
• How would such an effort be coordinated? Presently, there is no overall coordination and selections are fairly random.
• How will accuracy be insured? Some e-texts are published and never proofread after they are scanned. (Scanning is only 90% accurate.)
• Copyright is a major challenge. Authors want to earn income from their writing. "The fact is, the power of instantaneous free access is in direct conflict with the goals of commerce and copyright protections.... Copyright laws guarantee that any free digital library would have to be 75 to 150 years behind the times." (bibliotech.usc Winter 1998)
• Isn't some of what's published not worthy of being preserved?
• There are perhaps thousands of electronic books available on the Internet, but there are millions of titles now in print and tens of millions archived in research libraries. Most people don't have a clue.

"The possibility of making the Library of Alexandria available to everyone with a connection to the network is certainly feasible from the technological perspective, but a sober appraisal of the significant financial, logistical, legal and contractual obstacles suggests that this dream may be a long way off." (Educom Review, May 1996)

Experts agree that it will take one or two more decades until a largely digital research library exists. "But there's no doubt in anyone's mind that today's data highways are ushering in the greatest transformation in archived knowledge since the codex replaced the linear scroll 2,000 years ago." (bibliotech.usc Winter 1998)

To do your best, you need to be proficient at both web and library research skills.

Created in 2004 and not updated.