Digital Repositories: Not Quite at Your Fingertips

The digital repository is a key technology used by today’s li-braries to collect, organize, archive and make accessible elec-tronic files of different types. This paper argues that while the vision of the role of the digital repository has grown sharper and more articulate, the actual practical outcome has not met the hyperbole. Building blocks continue to be developed, but user access to repositories is still in its early development. There are promising exemplars of this tech-nology, but more effort is needed. Particularly promising is some vendor open source work that may provide the tools needed to open up these digital resources. But fundamental change in how the existence of these repositories and their content is made known to the online user community is needed; traditional metadata access and harvesting is not enough. Infusing the content with an information context may be one way to assure that repositories are a significant part not only of the library of the future but also of the world’s information landscape