There has been a rapid increase in the production and availability of information, in addition to the growing need for access to the same. Under this context, the transition from print to digital media is increasingly asserting itself as a decisive step towards the creation of a new library structure where information will exist only in digital form, being able to be accessed remotely and shared almost instantly, relatively low costs.

According to Marchiori [MAR97] as a possible break in the treatment and dissemination paradigm of information represented by the resources, activities and services of the “traditional library”. Barker [apudMAR97] identifies the seven basic functions assumed by the library system in use, namely: ·

Preservation and maintenance of culture

Knowledge archive; ·; · Dissemination of knowledge; · Knowledge sharing; · Information retrieval; · Education; · Social interaction: The implementation of digital library systems does not alter the functions listed above, it only provides new ways to make them feasible.

The archiving of information starts to take place in digital media, which allows a better preservation and maintenance of data that were previously subject to the degradation of the medium in which they were stored. The dissemination, sharing and retrieval of information now has the support of computer networks, hypermedia and knowbots1. Finally, a1 In the view of Vinton Cerf [apud TOM94] in relation to the digital library systems of the future, the “knowbots” will be small self-sustaining programs that move through networks,

reside on different machines and load search algorithms in databases relevant. The knowbots will be able to communicate, translate requests into specific formats, perform searches and then, if necessary, incorporate the search results into a new modified search.10 Education and social interaction take place through the adoption of new paradigms in the process teaching / learning as, for example, Distance Education and Computer Supported Collaborative Teaching.

According to Levacov [LEV99]

“the library stops being a tranquil deposit of books to become the focal point of varied research, accessed at any time by virtual users of several places in the world ”. In other words, libraries start to make available other information that is not necessarily that contained in e-encyclopedias books for local or remote users.1.1 CLASSES OF LIBRARIESBrowning [apud in LEV97] suggests the creation of “libraries without walls without pages” through the use of new technologies of information.

Then, the concepts of electronic library, digital library and virtual library arise, which we define as follows: · Electronic library: library in which the basic processes are of an electronic nature, that is, the use of computers includes the

construction of online indexes, the searching for texts and retrieving and storing records · Digital library: your information exists only in digital form. Although

the collection is not physical, it is still local to the library.

It has all the resources of an electronic library, such as searching and viewing documents (full text, video, etc.), both locally and remotely through computer networks. · Virtual library: as well as in the digital library, your collection also is exclusively in digital format. However, its structure is formed by a series of links that point both to a possible local collection and to documents, or any other digital objects2, scattered on the Web.

Currently, these models coexist with traditional libraries

and multimedia libraries. The transition to the digital library model follows the advances made through research and projects in this area. Some of these projects will be presented below.2 By using the term “digital objects” it becomes possible to cover different types of information stored in digital format, be it a document, a song, a film, an engraving, a piece of code, etc. .111.2 CURRENT OVERVIEW

Due to the growing need for information and the speed with which it is updated, alternatives have been studied for the storage, manipulation, distribution and retrieval of

Due to the growing need for information and the speed with which it is updated, alternatives have been studied for the storage, manipulation, distribution and retrieval of information in addition to the use of traditional libraries. Some experiments have already been developed using the new paradigm. of the

digital library, highlighting the following: · Project Gutenberg3: this project intends, until December 2001, to make free of charge thousands of electronic text texts whose copyright has expired. ·

American Memory Collections4: the enormous variety of collections at the Library of the American Congress makes it one of the largest libraries of the world. Little by little, this large amount of information is being made available through the Internet, with the objective of making available documents from its collection that are not subject to copyright law. One of the largest collections of documents from

the Library of Congress now in digital format is available through American MemoryCollections. In it, the user will find a heterogeneous set of information in the form of texts, images and sounds. All documents are freely available to researchers. · Project Xanadu5: intends to create a worldwide network that serves as a large repository of all documents of humanity.

These documents, archived in a universal data structure, could point associatively to other similar documents, having in common their digital and hypertextual nature, in which the links redefine the boundary between one document and another. · ACM Digital Library6: aware of technological innovations and its applications from births, engineering and information systems, the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) developed the ACM

Digital Library, through which it makes available to its members,

via Internet, vast resources for searching bibliographic information, citations and full text articles, with updated content of its main periodicals and conferences. Non-members can also use the research services, free of charge, through a registration as a visitor, but they will not be allowed to retrieve full text articles contained in the library, with restricted access only to abstracts. ·

PUCRS7 Digital Library: this project , under the responsibility of the Faculty of Computer Science and the Central Library of PUCRS, provides for the implementation of an integrated solution for the creation of a digital library, involving aspects such as digitalization of documents, storage, administration, search, distribution and protection of digital objects. · SciELO Scientific Eletronic Library Online.