Since technology has developed, we can find different kind of web pages. Some of them are digital libraries, in other words, web pages where different collections are stored in digital formats. This means that these kind of libraries are accessible by computer for everybody having internet conexion.
Although some of the digital libraries are even older than the web such as Project Perseus, Project Gutenberg, and ibiblio, there are more and more new libraries on the net. For instance, two of the many english digital libraries are The British Library,and the Darlingtong Digital Library. This last library was created from the first collections of books, manuscripts, atlases, and maps donated to the University of Pittsburgh by William M. Darlington. Altgough he started acquiring books on subjects such as Western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley, later he would expand these topics associating them the exploration of the Trans-Mississippi, the Far West, and even world history. Little y little he also started including atlases and maps, broadsides, manuscripts, lithographs, and works of art, John James Audubon’s Birds of America for instance.
When William Darlington died, his family continued what he started, his daughters as well as his wife. This way what at the beginning was just his, became a family thing, a family collection of works, being his daughter Edith and wife Mary who first made a donation to the University in 1918.
Like this, nowadays the library is runned by three librarians, three scanning technicians, and several University of Pittsburgh graduate students enrolled in the School of Information Science. As mentioned before, the content of the library is based on atlases, books, broadsides, images, manuscripts and finally, maps. These are the main categories in which it is divided.
REFERENCES:
*Digital library. (2009, October 14). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:15, October 20, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_library&oldid=319815245
*The Darlington Digital library (2007). In the web page of the Darlington Digital Library. Retrieved, October 20, 2009 from http://digital.library.pitt.edu/d/darlington/index.html
*List of digital library projects. (2009, September 17). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:19, October 20, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_digital_library_projects&oldid=314516494
*British Library. (2009, October 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 18:19, October 20, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=British_Library&oldid=318866413
