What is a Digital Library? A digital library is a highly organized collection of electronic resources.
Digital libraries share one important characteristic with search engines i.e. they can both be accessed online. However, while search engines cover a wide range of subject areas, digital libraries are more narrowly focused around one or a specific group of disciplines. Unlike search engines, digital libraries attach content-specific and highly descriptive metadata (descriptors/keywords) to describe each item in the collection. When a user conducts a search in the digital library it is this metadata that is searched. Search engines, on the other hand, search “blindly” on an item’s content and the results obtained may only indicate that a particular search terms appears somewhere in the item, and not whether the overall content of the item is relevant to the search. Therefore, searches in a digital library produce more useful results, save users’ time and effort in searching, and users can access the information found instantly.
