The Indonesian Digital Library Network is Born to Struggle with the Digital Divide

Abstract

IndonesiaDLN — The Indonesian Digital Library Network — is a distributed collection of digital library networks, digital library servers, full local contents, metadata, and people, all engaged in developing Indonesia as a knowledge-based society. Besides the general issues of digital libraries such as publishing, quality control, authentication, networking, and information retrieval, Indonesia also faces other issues — namely, the digital divide — in designing and implementing the Indonesian DLN Network. This paper describes the basic design of the Network that enables it to handle the typical problems encountered in a developing country's digital library network, such as internet accessibility, bandwidth capacity, and network delays. Also described are the experiences in implementing the Network, which currently has 14 successfully connected partners and more than 15 partners in the process of developing their digital library servers.