Analysis of Paradigm Evolution of Digital Library in
Tan Sun, Guobin Huang
The Library of Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS,
In recent years, with the development of grid and appearance of e-Science, digital library world begins to probe into the construction modes and development tactics of digital library under e-Science environment. Before the existence of e-Science, as the important part of digital library, digital resource is very essential. However, that will be broken up with the result that lots of advanced technologies such as grid make digital library collect global resource that could be transferred in a short time, including information resource, equipment resource, instrument resource; and that that make users set up their personal digital library as soon as possible in order to have digital library collect special resource automatically. In e-Science environment, although owning digital resource is not the core of digital library, digital resource all over the world could be accessed and transferred with permission.
Since 1995, China has begun to follow up the scent of research progress of international digital library .Whereafter, she has come into the period of complete practice with the mark of construction of Chinese Pilot Digital Library, CALIS, NSTL and CSDL.At the present time, the system structure of digital library in China Mainland is distributed, preliminarily comprising nationwide digital libraries, industry digital libraries, district digital libraries and individual digital libraries. At a minimum, two aspects have embodied the advance of chinese digital library.On one hand, digital library in China Mainland has stridden forwards from resource digitalization to hiberarchy integration in resource construction. For example, integration construction of resource of the primary digital library projects has evolved from being based on catalogs to being based on systems and presently to being based on systems and metadata together. On the other hand, chinese digital library has been provided with distributed heterogeneous integration services. With the abroad development of e-Science and grid, digital library in China Mainland will embed the process of the study, work and research of users under the new service environment e-Science, moving towards being more interactive, dynamic and personalized, eventually making its paradigm evolve.
In this paper, the author analyzes the development skeleton of digital library in China Mainland, particularly points out the current demand character, development demand and development period of digital library. On that basis, the paper concludes that it is necessary to start up a new paradigm evolution of digital library in China Mainland, from traditional digital library to virtual digital library (VDL). And it also describes some problems and development approaches that developing VDL in China Mainland should deal with in details, including definitude of the status of digital library in e-Science environment, rebuilding of the structure of digital library, improvement of the current digital library, restructure of the digital library layer of current digital library and foundation of the application layer of VDL.
Keywords: Analysis, Paradigm Evolution, Digital Library, VDL,