The study explored trends and issues in digital libraries with a view to furnish the expected audience with current happenings in this area of operations and service delivery. The chapter is a detailed review of characteristics of digital libraries considering the creation of digital collections which include conversion of retrospective materials, born digital resources and institutional repositories. The paper considered digital collections and copyright issues, benefits and issues of digital libraries, preservation of digital content. It x-rayed trends in information discovery, access and retrieval in a digital library, human-computer interaction, information organization and categorization of digital library services.
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According to Yan and ZHA, (2014) a digital library is a distributed system that has the capability to store various electronic resources, which can be easily and conveniently accessed by remote end-users via networks. In the last couple of years, digital libraries have moved away from a strong aspiration to realism and being an extension of physical libraries in the modern information society, whereas a digital library is a collection of information that has associated services delivered to user communities using a variety of technologies (Heradio, Fernandez-Amoros, Cabrerizo, & Herrera-Viedma, 2012).In the same vein, Lesk (2005) opined that it is a collection of information which is both digitized and organized that gives us the power we never had with traditional libraries. Khan and Bhatti (2015) affirmed that today, university libraries worldwide are no longer mere storehouses of print information requiring patrons to be physically present to use information, but are spaces providing digital resources that can be accessed anywhere which makes it virtual.
However, Chang-Ping, Yuan, & Wei-Wei (2014) opined that as a result of rapid developments in internet technology and changing behavior of information users, the functions of the digital library have changed significantly. Thus a digital library is not only a collection of documents in well-organized electronic format but also a platform for users' communication, e-learning and e-research. Indeed, the digital library provides effective and efficient access to digital information or Electronic Information Resources (EIR) to the academic community e.g. faculty members and students to assist them in examining issues, proffering solutions to problems, making decisions, as well as support learning, teaching, research and much more (Aramide & Bello, 2010).