A 25 Year Retrospective on D-Lib Magazine

Abstract

In July, 1995 the first issue of D-Lib Magazine was published as an on-line, HTML-only, open access magazine, serving as the focal point for the then emerging digital library research community. In 2017 it ceased publication, in part due to the maturity of the community it served as well as the increasing availability of and competition from eprints, institutional repositories, conferences, social media, and online journalsthe very ecosystem that D-Lib Magazine nurtured and enabled. As longtime members of the digital library community and authors with the most contributions to D-Lib Magazine, we reflect on the history of the digital library community and D-Lib Magazine, taking its very first issue as guidance. It contained three articles, which described: the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, a project status report from the NSF/DARPA/NASAfunded Digital Library Initiative (DLI), and a summary of the Kahn-Wilensky Framework (KWF) which gave us, among other things, Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). These technologies, as well as many more described in D-Lib Magazine through its 22 years, have had a profound and continuing impact on the digital library and general web communities.

D-lib magazine pioneered web-based scholarly communication

“…The 20 year anniversary had a more muted tone, with only the issue's editorial marking the event [65]; perhaps because editor Larry Lannom knew the time for the final editorial was not far off [66]. On the 25 year anniversary of the first issue, we reflected on the impact of D-Lib Magazine, both for the information that it conveyed as well as a proof-of-concept for many DL and web concepts and technologies that we enjoy today [90].…”