Digital Library Technologies (DLT)

"The true university of these days is a collection of books." Carlyle, 1841

Thomas Carlyle's familiar message, which graces Pattee Library's facade, underscores our academic community's commitment to information.

Digital Library Technology's (DLT) role is to provide the means to access Penn State's collection of books, as well as the ever-burgeoning digital information resources, now commonplace, that were unheard of only a few years ago. This is accomplished through LIAS (Library Information Access System), which provides the gateway through which Penn State scholars enter the "information universe." Traditionally, academic libraries comprised the center of the scholarly universe, and a library's size and its collections essentially determined what a scholar could access and use. Today's academic library is a vastly different place: its walls and collections continue to house a rich treasure of information, but it is now the scholar who is at the center of the information universe, and the scholar's library is virtual.

For the last two decades, LIAS' role has been to provide scholars with access to information, initially, to materials existing within the University Libraries' walls, and now, to any library or resource, any time, in print or digital form, including full text, sound, video, and image. Indeed, many resources today exist only in digital form. The organizing function remains important for libraries, perhaps even more so today as information resources continue to explode. Tools for filtering and manipulating data, as well as authenticating user access to licensed information that may reside elsewhere, are routine aspects of making information available to scholars.

Beyond the foreground tasks that LIAS performs to make information readily available is its never-ending background work to seamlessly support basic operations: ordering new titles, cataloging, circulating materials, sharing resources with other libraries, etc. Even these seemingly routine procedures reflect the virtual library. For instance, cataloging may describe a book to be placed on library shelves, or link to a Web resource housed thousands of miles away, or to a thesis no longer in paper form, but now electronic. Circulation transactions may occur at the checkout desk, or by a Penn State patron in another country who places a "Hold" on an item that is on order, but has not yet arrived.

As Mr. Carlyle so aptly noted, the true university is a collection of books. However, in today's university, it is also a diverse collection of digital resources.

To learn more about DLT, please see http://www.dlt.its.psu.edu/ on the Web.