Digital Libraries: A Case of Australia

Abstract

This paper is the result of primitive study based on the visits made to university libraries in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne. This paper presents an overview of digital libraries (DL) in Australian universities with a view to: (1) provide an understanding of the various DL and its services to their Clienteles; (2) identifying the various features including organisation of information, user interfaces, access and search and retrieval facilities and (3) understand of various DL projects by Australian government conjoint with other universities. This article showcases the latest trends in DL which has adopted technologies (i.e. open source or commercial or mixed) which gives insight to re-use of the knowledge. This enables to save the time of the users & library staff within the local infrastructure. The government plays a prominent role in development of DL and Universities themselves unite together to bring out the practical ways of handling resource sharing and cut down the budget constraint. This case study will provide hints for decision making to adopt some of these features in future planning of DL.