Virtual Libraries Support Online Learning

Dating back to the end of the Middle Ages, at the heart of every traditional university has been a great library. Libraries are essential elements in the process we call education.

In the early 17th century, Sir Francis Bacon may have created one of the first library cataloging systems. As part of his essay “In Advancement of Learning,” he divided “all knowledge” according to the faculties of memory, imagination, and reason. Thomas Jefferson used the same three categories to organize his own large personal library out of which grew the Library of Congress, which has become the largest repository of information in the world.

At the heart of any great virtual university has to be a great virtual library. There is enough digital and digitized information today to develop virtual libraries filled with the world’s knowledge; and it is available to anyone with access to the Internet.

Almost every major university research library in the U.S. has initiated a program to place part of its collections and archives into digital format, usually available for free on the Web. A similar spontaneous movement is taking place in Europe and parts of Asia, as evidenced by the Treasures from Europe’s National Libraries collection on the Web, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s program to digitize thousands of French texts and images, and the University of Adelaide’s Electronic Text Collection.

The Library of Congress’s National Digital Library Program had placed 15.3 million primary documents of American history and culture online free of charge by the end of 2008.

Visit the Library of Congress American Memory home page.