What is Personal Digital Library

As collections of relevant information either for public use or for personal use in a Web-based personal computer look like a digital library to its owner, this mechanism is called a Personal Digital Library (PDL). PDL will realise the selections of books, PDLs, and related persons through intellectual associations. As a server, PDL can store information simply and efficiently for easy retrieval and search, and provide intelligent supports for users (clients) to browse and find information. On the other hand, as a client, PDL can concurrently browse and automatically retrieve information from different PDLs (servers), and find a related person to communicate with during browsing. In addition, other PDLs can serve as memory extensions to overcome storage limitation in the local computer and avoid information duplication on the Web. PDL has potential uses in many areas such as personal use, education, commerce, finance, and entertainment. Personal users can employ any PDL with an Internet connection to manipulate their distributed information from anywhere around the world. This article introduces PDL design and prototyping. The prototype implemented shows that the PDL concept is feasible under existing technologies. Although PDL is designed to manage personal information collections in a network-based personal computer, it will be fruitful if the design or ideas presented in this article can stimulate further development in the Digital Library research.