DIGITAL LIBRARIES – GOOD OR BAD CHOICES ON ORGANIZING INFORMATION Adi-Cristina Mitea, Daniel Volovici, Antoniu Pitic “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu - Computer Science Department, Romania adi.mitea@ulbsibiu.ro, daniel.volovici@ulbsibiu.ro, antoniu.pitic@ulbsibiu.ro ABSTRACT Digital documents as the real ones have to be classified and indexed in a library for proper future exploitation. Classification and indexation process is a hard one for librarians all over the world. A software system can ease their work and make the process more accurate. We present in our paper methods for classifying and indexing publications, suitable for such a system and analyze different storage and index database management systems capabilities in order to use them as support for classification, indexation and retrieval processes in an integrated software system for libraries. Furthermore, the problem of storing and retrieval of full content of a publication is taken into consideration. Keywords: digital library, classification, indexation, storage and index structures. 1 INTRODUCTION Significant progress was made in computers and information technologies in last decades. So, today we have computers at work everywhere, from technical to socio-human and services fields. Growth in computing and storing capabilities, also with the possibility to interconnect different computer systems determined a radical change in the way we perceive and interact with a lot of today’s real world concepts. One of them is the library concept. Computers and information technology introduced a new concept, that of digital library. The classical management methods used in a public library had to be changed and improved so they can benefit from the new technologies. A digital library may permit not only to store, in a digital form, classical information about books and other publications like author, title, publishing house, publication year, ISBN, ISSN, table of contents, abstract/full text, etc, but also has to offer users an easily, rapidly and accurate method for retrieving desired publications. Often readers do not know the title and author of a book or publication they need or they want a publication that covers a specific field or subject of interest. The librarian has to be able to deliver the right books for them. To be able to do that, the librarian might use classification and indexation methods. Classifying and indexing publications in a library is a very important task for a librarian and it is essential for future successful exploitation of the library assets. Digital libraries can be interconnected, so it is very important to have and use a similar method for classifying and indexing documents from everywhere. Another very hard problem is that libraries do not used or even use today the same format to store their data. If data will be put in the same format, this will make possible a distributed search in all connected libraries. With a computer aid it is possible to automate the classification and indexation process and also to retrieve publications which match some particular criteria from different interconnected digital libraries. Libraries data, classification data, indexation data have to be stored in a database for future processing so it is very important to fully understand their characteristics in order to make the best selection. Application designers must decide whether to store binary large objects, in our case the actual content of a digital library, in a filesystem or in a database. Generally, this decision is based on factors such as application simplicity, manageability or system performance. 2 CLASSIFICATION AND INDEXATION METHODS FOR LIBRARIES Librarians developed over the years different methods to classify and index library publications to be able to manage more easily the library content and to deliver to readers the right books. Many of these methods lost over the time, because they were difficult to apply and laborious, but some of them are still known and applied in different libraries. Unfortunately, there is not in the present a unique method accepted and applied by everyone from every library in the world. This weakness makes the Special issue of The Romanian Educational Network - RoEduNet UbiCC Journal, Volume 6 693