Introduction

Abstract

As we look forward to the emergence of semantic digital libraries, it is good to consider their origins and sources in traditional digital libraries. A short examination of their definitions and applications will prove fruitful. It will provide a base for our later examination of the implications of adding semantic power to the digital library concept. This digital library (DL) was intended to provide several services which traditional access methods did not: long names, BLOB storage, document storage, rapid directory search, inter-object links, and a great deal of metadata. Later, an indexing method was invented to allow full text indexing of the objects for sophisticated search and retrieval. This was a hashed bitmap index known as the Holographic Index Access Method (HIAM). © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.