The Alexandria Digital Library Project Review, Assessment, and Prospects

Abstract

The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) was established in the late 1990s as a response to several perceived problems of traditional map libraries, notably access and organization. By 1999 it had evolved into an operational digital library, offering a well-defined set of services to a broad user community, based on an extensive collection of georeferenced information objects. The vision of ADL continues to evolve, as technology makes new services possible, as its users become more sophisticated and demanding, and as the broader field of geographic information science (GlScience) identifies new avenues for research and application.