How to Build a Digital Library is the only book that offers all the knowledge and tools needed to construct and maintain a digital library, regardless of the size or purpose. It is a self-contained resource for individuals, companies, and institutions wishing to put these powerful tools to work in their burgeoning information treasuries.

This Second Edition reflects the rapid evolution of the field, with new material on multimedia, metadata and internationalization. New technologies are integrated with concepts from library and information science to provide a comprehensive social, technical and practical treatment of digital libraries.

Part II describes how this is put into practice with the Greenstone Digital Library Software, a popular open source software tool suite. For the second edition this material has been completely rewritten to reflect new developments in the software, including a comprehensive graphical facility for creating and maintaining digital libraries and numerous interoperability features.

Key Features

• Outlines the history of libraries—both traditional and digital—and their impact on present practices and future directions.
• Written for both technical and non-technical audiences and covers the entire spectrum of media, including text, images, audio, video, and related XML standards.

This web site contains:

• On-line PDF version of the Appendix More on Markup.
• Preface and Chapter 1 samplers

About the Authors

Ian H. Witten, David Bainbridge, and David M. Nichols are computer science faculty members at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, and members of the New Zealand Digital Library Research Project.

Ian Witten, who founded the project, is a professor of computer science, and was awarded the IFIP Namur Award in recognition of his "outstanding contribution to the awareness of social implications of information technology".

David Bainbridge is an associate professor, and through his work as co-director of the research project has collaborated with UN agencies, the BBC, and various public and national libraries.

David Nichols is a senior lecturer and specializes in the areas of human-computer interaction, open source software and digital library education.