Page 8 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

SU Xinning / Opportunities and challenges faced by digital libraries in the big data era 007

Above all, due to the rapid construction of academic, educational, and cultural resources by the
network resource providers, they have surpassed traditional digital libraries from either the scale or
the types of resources. Resource development is further deepened and services are diversified by
providers. Traditional digital libraries will face even greater challenge in their future development.
How to survive and develop instead of being replaced is a rising issue which digital libraries must
pay attention to.
The challenge, of course, can also become an opportunity to the library. Using the opportunity
introduced by the big data era, we can refresh our conventional understanding regarding to
resources, resource organization, technologies, services and functions, re-design the architecture
of a digital library, and convert the challenge into the opportunity of another boom. This is the
objective of this paper.

1 Related research and enlightenment

In a big data era, people’s mindset has undergone a fundamental change. So the construction of
a digital library shall also adopt the mindset of big data. In order to get the enlightenment from
related studies, the author searched the domestic full-text database CNKI and oversea full-text
database EBSCO, and retrieved over 40 and 20 papers relevant to big data and digital libraries
respectively. Among those papers, the number of papers closely associated with big data and digital
libraries was slightly more than 10, of which only several from overseas. However, these papers
had given us certain insight in the discussion of the future of digital libraries.

1.1 Related domestic and oversea statement

In the era of big data, people persistently explore the fusion point of big data and digital libraries.
Foreign scholars did a lot of research from theory, technology and application aspects. For
instance, Huwe (2014) from the library of the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out in his
paper “Building digital libraries: big data and the library” that, big data and libraries were a union
made by heaven; the user-oriented research projects of librarians were especially adaptable to big
data, so the information acquisition of digital libraries on user behavior should be strengthened.
Renaud from the University of California, Irvine, Britton and others from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (Renaud, Britton, D. Wang, & Ogihara, 2015) used big data technology
to deeply explore the behavior of university digital library users, and help the university in its
correlation analysis of students’ reading behavior and related information. In terms of technology,
Borgman, Wallis, Mayernik, and Pepe (2007) from the University of California, Los Angeles
adopted embedded technology, embedded sensors in the digital library system, collected relevant
data, so provided data for researchers to carry out research, and added new function to the digital