The digital engineering library: Current technologies and challenges

Digital library technologies and implementations continue to evolve. Current digital library work emphasizes the integration of distributed information resources with support services that facilitate locating, retrieving, and organizing this digital content. The present working environment of distributed information resources includes publisher full-text repositories, periodical index databases, Web-based resources, Web portals and search engines, and local information resources such as the online catalog and custom databases. Emerging full-text standards, such as the extensible Markup Language (XML), and linking standards, such as the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), will play prominent roles in improving access and retrieval over these heterogeneous digital resources. Several example applications, developed at the Grainger Engineering Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and designed to address digital library integration and linking issues, are presented. The role of libraries and librarians in this evolving digital library environment is discussed.