Practical Digital Libraries: Books, Bytes, and Bucks (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Multimedia Information and Systems) - Hardcover

"While others speculate on the organizational dilemmas facing libraries and
universities in a digital information environment or argue the relative philosophical merits of print versus digital media, Lesk has constructed an on-the-ground picture of the various working components of the digital
environment. Viewed as a whole and with an engineering sense of composition, his picture is remarkable--almost astonishing--because it reveals how advanced the digital environment has truly become."

--Donald J. Waters

Associate University Librarian, Yale University

A digital library is not merely a collection of electronic information. It is an organized and digitized system of data that can serve as a rich resource for its user community. This authoritative and accessible guide for librarians and computer scientists explores the technologies behind digital libraries, the choices to be made in building them, and the economic and policy structures that affect them.

The most comprehensive book on the subject, Practical Digital Libraries

• offers the most wide-ranging overview of digital libraries currently available
  
• analyzes economic and intellectual issues in the emerging digital environment
  
• shows how text, images, audio, and video can be represented, distributed, used, and collected as forms of knowledge

Michael Lesk joined the computer science research group at Bell Laboratories after receiving his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Physics in 1969. He went on to manage the computer science research group at Bellcore, where he is now a chief research scientist. He is best known for his work in electronic libraries, but has worked in document production and retrieval software, computer networks, computer languages, and human-computer interfaces as well. Past chair of the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest groups on Language Analysis and Information Retrieval, Lesk was Senior Visiting Fellow of the British Library in 1987 and is currently Visiting Professor of Computer Science at University College London. Lesk has been recently elected to the US National Academy of Engineering, in recognition of his contributions to UNIX applications, information systems, and digital libraries.