Given modern society's need to control its ever-increasing body of information, digital libraries will be among the most important and influential institutions of this century. With their versatility, accessibility, and economy, these focused collections of everything digital are fast becoming the "banks" in which the world's wealth of information is stored.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-no matter how large or small. Two internationally recognized experts provide a fully developed, step-by-step method, as well as the software that makes it all possible. How to Build a Digital Library is the perfectly self-contained resource for individuals, agencies, and institutions wishing to put this powerful tool to work in their burgeoning information treasuries. - Sketches the history of libraries-both traditional and digital-and their impact on present practices and future directions - Offers in-depth coverage of today's practical standards used to represent and store information digitally - Uses Greenstone, freely accessible open-source software-available with interfaces in the world's major languages (including Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic) - Written for both technical and non-technical audiences

Ian H. Witten is a professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He received an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has published widely on digital libraries, machine learning, text compression, hypertext, speech synthesis and signal processing, and computer typography. He has written several books, the latest being Managing Gigabytes (1999) and Data Mining (2000), both from Morgan Kaufmann.

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Orientation: The world of digital libraries
Chapter 2 Preliminaries: Sorting out the ingredients
Chapter 3 Presentation: User interfaces
Chapter 4 Documents: The raw material
Chapter 5 Markup and metadata: Elements of organization
Chapter 6 Construction: Building collections
Chapter 7 Delivery: How Greenstone works
Chapter 8 Interoperability: Standards and protocols
Chapter 9 Visions: Future, past, and present
References
Glossary of terms
Appendix A Installing and operating Greenstone
Appendix B Greenstone source code