I agreewholeheartedly with "there is no digital library, it's just the 
library".  And just the library increasingly has not only it's 
collections but it's services digital and online (is digital reference 
part of the 'digital library'? can you have a 'digital library' without 
online reference?  Forget it, it's just the library, but that library 
better be increasingly digital if it wants to survive. )

But of course, you still need some name for this class of software 
intended to be a platform for your digital stuff, possibly with 
preservation, possibly with workflow built in, possibly not. But it's a 
platform to hold your digital stuff. One of my local colleagues says 
"digital shelves", which sounds good to me. "Digital library" I don't 
like for the reasons Leslie mentioned, and because I've always been 
confused as to why the "library" in "digital library" is understood to 
just be talking about _stuff_, about collections, , when we all work in 
libraries and know a library is more than just it's collections!   
"Institutional repository", talk about jargon, and yeah, it's not clear 
to me _why_ we'd draw such a distinction between digital copies of our 
own institutional output, and digital copies of other stuff.  But if we 
did need such a special name for our own institution's output, didn't we 
already have the word "archives"  for that?   What's the point of all 
these new jargony phrases? They seem only to serve to seperate off 
certain organizational activities and collections in their own silos, 
when they ought to be integrated into a "single business" model instead.

Jonathan

Leslie Johnston wrote:
> I have grown to really dislike the phrase "digital library."  
>
> In my last job most folks referred to "The DL" when they meant the
> digital collection repository (NOT an IR, but a repo for digitized
> library collections).  Some of us kept making the point that "digital
> library" meant not just digitized physical collections, but databases
> and ejournals and licensed digital images and GIS data and faculty
> publications and born-digital scholarship and so on.  And even if we
> used the phrase more inclusively, it seemed silly to semantically
> segregate that content from the physical collections just because it was
> digital.  
>
> There is no digital library — it's just the library.
>
> Leslie
>
> ----------
> Leslie Johnston
> Digital Media Project Coordinator
> Office of Strategic Initiatives
> Library of Congress
> 202-707-2801
> [log in to unmask]
>
>   

-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 
rochkind (at) jhu.edu