Abstract:

Libraries have a long tradition in attempting to satisfy the informational needs of both teachers and learners of all educational levels, from Primary and Secondary Education (school libraries) to Higher Education (academic and research libraries), mainly by means of providing access to the best quality content. In the digital environment, these libraries have transferred their services quite successfully. However, libraries have realized the Web brings opportunities for providing more sophisticated ways of supporting their users’ activities, turning the digital library into a place where the educational community could not only get informed but also learn in a more autonomous and social manner. This has led to the development of several projects and applications of Web 2.0 services to libraries (library 2.0) as well as innovations in information organization and visualization as tools for learning. This paper begins by analysing how the conceptualization of digital libraries in the educational domain has evolved and why we contend the approriateness, in this context, of the term “educational digital libraries”. Then, it explores some of the most relevant trends in digital library applications for education, focusing on the developments within the Library & Information Science (LIS) area. After that, the paper presents the advances of the DOTEINE research group on the development of applications for educational digital libraries, particularly those projects developed for the School Digital Library of the International Centre for Advanced Technologies (CITA) of the Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Foundation (FGSR). To conclude, discussion and remarks on future work are provided.