This item on "Digital Library" is one of a segment on"Metadata and Electronic Document Management for Electronic Commerce" first presented for the Australian National University course "Information Technology in Electronic Commerce" (COMP3410/COMP6341).

This document is intended to provide both for live group presentation and accompanying lecture notes for individual use. The Slides and these notes are provided in the one HTML document, using HTML Slidy.

The Digital Library allows access to electronic documents, while respecting the intellectual property rights of the author. Before the web, the distinction between internal organisation documents and external publishing was clear. With the advent of the web, these distinctions are disappearing and there is a tendency to use the same technology for creating and indexing internal documents and for external document publishing. However, the legal distinctions remain and business practice has not caught up with technological developments. Therefore "publishing" for the electronic library remains a separate and distinct activity.

A good overview of e-publishing issues is provided in the Australian Government Information Management Office's Web Publishing Guide. The guidelines require the use of the AGLS metadata.

Publishing, even academic publishing, is a significant economic activity and can also have significant effects on the lives of the public. This example from the Journal of Neurology contains a potentially dangerous mistake

Libraries, such as the ANU Library, now provide web based search facilities which look similar to web search engines. They look like web search engines partly because web search engines evolved from concepts of libraries and partly because on-line library users are now used to web search interfaces.

It should be appreciated that libraries have been in the information business for longer than IT professionals. As an example the Library of Alexandria was destroyed by fire about 2000 years ago and opened again in 2003, with a web site.

Libraries are progressively changing from paper based to electronic systems, first for metadata and then for the information resources themselves.

Libraries use specialised terms for metadata items. Some of these persist in library systems, such as the need to type in author names backwards, with the family name first.

As with corporate records management systems, library catalogues have been adapted to record both paper and electronic documents. The ANU library catalogue includes links to on-line versions of documents, where available.

The same catalogue information can also be displayed in the MARC format, developed in the 1970s for "MAchine-Readable Cataloging"' by libraries. This format uses numeric codes to identify each metadata item.

As with other metadata formats, MARC is being adapted to XML formats.

However, it is more useful if the metadata is converted to Dublin Core format for use in non-library systems.