Developing digital libraries of cultural content for Internet access

Over the past five years, interest in digital libraries and in the World Wide Web have both greatly increased as the result of a symbiotic relationship. For an even longer period, my IBM colleagues and I have been developing online digital libraries for cultural institutions. In this article, selected aspects of projects with the Vatican Library, the National Gallery of Art (United States), the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College, and Russia's State Hermitage Museum are reported. In these projects, both technical and institutional challenges were met. Three technical challenges are discussed: protecting the intellectual property rights of institutions to their online materials; producing high-quality images with data sizes that are suitable for Internet delivery; and achieving significant capture throughput. Finally, some opinions are offered on the outlook for digital libraries of cultural content.