History, evolution, and impact of digital libraries

Digital Libraries have achieved a fundamental role in our knowledge society. By making the wealth of material contained in libraries, museum, archives and any knowledge repository worldwide available they are giving citizens in every place of the world the opportunity to appreciate their global cultural heritage and use it for study, work or leisure. They are revolutionising the whole knowledge management lifecycle. In this chapter, the history characterizing these "knowledge enabling technologies" is described. The history starts from the early attempts toward systems supporting knowledge discovery and reaches the current age in which a plethora of different realizations of digital library systems coexist. The evolutionary process conducting to the current, multi-instanced and still evolving status of affairs as well as the motivations governing it are identified and presented. The main initiatives and milestones producing the nowadays instances of these knowledge enabling systems are mentioned. Finally, the impact these systems had and are having on various aspects of our society is discussed.