Dartmouth students will soon have access to a world of information beyond the dusty stacks of Baker Library thanks to a "digital library" which will add a variety of digital multimedia and electronic publications to the over two million printed volumes.
According to College Librarian Richard Lucier, the new resource -- set to debut this fall -- will combine scholarly resources with the Internet's ease of use.
"Dartmouth has been a leader in technology and the application of technology to scholarship and education," according to Lucier, a tradition he hopes to continue with the digital library.
Project coordinators compared the digital library to "an academic Google," referring to the popular Internet search engine.
Associate College Librarian John James explained that the digital library, by working from a defined content base, would "help to narrow things somewhat more than Google does" with its thorough searches.
Dartmouth is working with several other institutions and the Fretwell Downing Company to develop the digital library. The College has also worked closely with the Digital Library Federation, a consortium of major research universities, to facilitate the sharing of content.
In collaborating with other libraries, Lucier said, Dartmouth will be able to expand its educational resources "far beyond anything we could physically create here in Hanover."
Several other colleges and universities, such as the University of California, have undertaken similar digital library projects, according to Lucier.
Few libraries, however, "have taken a systematic approach" to building a digital library, he added.
Because of the great cost of purchasing the rights to content -- the College pays millions of dollars annually for rights to make its digital resources available online -- the digital library will not be available for public use. The electronic resources will be available free, however, to the Dartmouth community and to partner libraries.
In addition to the digital library, the Dartmouth library system is developing a Digital Publishing Project , which would provide a non-commercial venue for academic journal-style publication.
In March, the DPP released the first issue of Linguistic Discovery, a peer-reviewed electronic journal devoted to poorly understood languages. Next winter, the journal Latino Intersections, co-sponsored by the sociology department, will debut with student and faculty submissions.
While there was at one point a certain stigma associated with digital publications, as many thought the quality of electronically-produced journals will be lower, such attitudes have disappeared, James said.
Any new digital publication "would have the same acceptance problems if it were in print," he added.
Furthermore, digital publications offer the potential for far more content than traditional print, including audio, video or other multimedia components. "We may see digital publications that do very different things than we see in print," James said.
