Page 12 - Building Digital Libraries

Acknowledgments

When we created the first edition of this book in 2006, cultural heritage
organizations largely thought about institutional repositories in terms of
publishing open-access content. These issues are still present, but the variety
of needs that repositories must serve has expanded, as has the content they
provide. Moreover, repositories have become a much more integral part of
library operations—the long-term success of libraries and cultural heritage
organizations partly depends on their ability to create and integrate digital
library platforms into their identities.
As we considered writing this new edition, we wanted to address this
shift in thinking and expand the book to explore the wider issues sur-
rounding digital libraries and the infrastructure that makes them possible.
We hope we’ve succeeded, and that this book will help practitioners and
students understand how the landscape has changed for cultural heritage
organizations. We further hope that this book will afford its readers a bet-
ter understanding of how one can initiate and sustain digital endeavors in
libraries.
As in other areas of life, many others have helped us throughout the
writing of this book. Friends, colleagues, and family members endured our
endless musings on technical and library topics and shared ideas that really
changed how we look at things.
We are grateful to Rachel Chance and others working behind the scenes
at ALA Neal-Schuman Publishing for their support. Our names might be
on the cover, but our colleagues have put in an enormous amount of work
to make this book much better than it otherwise would have been, while
leaving us to work on the fun parts.

Kyle’s Notes
First and foremost, I want to dedicate my efforts to my dad. He always liked
to say that people get so fixated on ants that they don’t notice elephants
walking by. The multitude of technologies, standards, methods, reports,

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