UC Berkeley's Digital Library project

Abstract

For digital libraries to succeed, we must abandon the traditional notion of “library” altogether. The reason is as follows: The digital “library” will be a collection of distributed information services; producers of material will make it available, and consumers will find it and use it, perhaps through the help of automated agents. Libraries in the traditional sense are nowhere to be found in this model (i. e., the notion of a limited intermediary containing some small fraction of preselected material available only to local patrons is replaced by a system providing to users everywhere direct access to the full contents of all available material).