HYBRID LIBRARY

HYBRID LIBRARY

HYBRID LIBRARY

HYBRID LIBRARY

Towards the Hybrid Library

Background and context

Many D-Lib readers will be very familiar with the US Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) [1], funded by three agencies of the USA federal government: the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NSF/DARPA/NASA). I understand this has been mostly a large-scale computer science research program. But the title and the subject area make it an obvious point of contrast with eLib. After attending a couple of their conferences, my sense is the word seemed to be "ASQ-not", meaning "don't automate the status quo". The participants aimed (properly) to be innovative and free-thinking, leaving aside the constraints of existing practice. The results are exciting and extraordinarily interesting, but it is very hard to determine how many of these ideas might be effectively deployed in real life situations. It is notoriously difficult to transfer new technology from experiment to practice, but this is clearly harder the more distant the experimental context from real life.

INTRODUCTION

Hybrid libraries are mixes of traditional print material such as books and magazines, as well as electronic based material such as downloadable audio books, electronic journals, e-books, etc. Hybrid libraries are the new norm in most public and academic libraries.^[ It seems that the term "hybrid library" was first coined in 1998 by Chris Rusbridge in an article for .
Hybrid libraries evolved in the 1990s when electronic resources became more easily available for libraries to acquire for public use.^{[citation needed]} Initially these electronic resources were typically access to material distributed on media such as CD-ROM or searches of specialised databases. OCLC helped push libraries towards acquiring digital resources by providing a centralized technology resource for participating libraries.^[2] Now, with the widespread availability of digital content, it includes Internet resources and documents which are online, such as eprints.