The role of digital libraries in moving toward knowledge environments

For thousands of years, libraries have allowed humanity to collect and organize data and information, and to support the discovery and communication of knowledge, across time and space. Coming together in this Internet Age, the world's societies have extended this process to span from the personal to the global, as the concepts, practices, systems, and services related to Library and Information Science unfold through digital libraries. Scientists, scholars, teachers, learners, and practitioners of all kinds benefit from the distributed and collaborative knowledge environments that are at the heart of the digital library movement. Digital libraries thus encompass the dimensions in the 5S Framework: Societies, Scenarios, Spaces, Streams, and Structures. To clarify this approach, we explain the role of meta-models, such as of a minimal digital library (DL), and of more specialized (discipline-oriented) DLs, such as archeological DLs. We illustrate how suitable knowledge environments can be more easily prepared as instances of these meta-models, resulting in usable and useful DLs, including for education, computing, and archaeology.